SK hynix announced today that it developed PCB01, an SSD product with the industry's best specifications, for on-device AI PCs. The product marks the first case where the industry adopts the fifth generation of the 8-channel PCIe technology and brings innovation to performance including the data processing speed. The company expects the latest advancement in the NAND solution space to add to its success stories in the high-performance DRAM area led by HBM, enhancing its leadership in the overall AI memory space.

With a validation process with a global PC customer underway, SK hynix plans to mass produce and start shipping the products to both corporate customers and general consumers within this year. PCB01 comes with the capabilities of sequential read and write speeds of 14 GB and 12 GB per second, respectively, bringing the performance of an SSD to the level unseen before. The speeds allow the operation of a large language model or LLM, for AI training and inference, in a second.The product also comes with an improvement in power efficiency of more than 30% compared with the previous generation, enhancing the stability of the large-scale AI computing tasks. SK hynix also adopted the SLC caching for the production of PCB01. With the adoption of the technology that places the single level cell, or SLC, in some parts of the NAND cell to accelerate performance, a PC user can experience a faster performance for both AI services and conventional computing.

The product is also equipped with the capability aimed at protecting personal data. SK hynix engineers built the root of trust, or ROT, a security solution, in the PCB01 to prevent external cybersecurity attacks and forging and falsification of information, while protecting a user's password.

Ahn Hyun, Head of the N-S Committee at SK hynix, said that numerous global providers of CPU for on-device AI PCs are requesting collaboration for compatibility validation process. "We will work towards enhancing our leadership as the global top AI memory provider also in the NAND solution space by successfully completing the customer validation and mass production of PCB01, which will be in the limelight."