Micron Technology, Inc., today announced availability of the Micron 9550 NVMe SSD - the world's fastest data center SSD and industry leader in AI workload performance and power efficiency. The Micron 9550 SSD showcases Micron's deep expertise and innovation by integrating its own controller, NAND, DRAM and firmware into one world-class product. This integrated solution enables class-leading performance, power efficiency and security features for data center operators.

The Micron 9550 SSD delivers best-in-class performance with 14.0 GB/s sequential reads and 10.0 GB/s sequential writes to provide up to 67% better performance over similar competitive SSDs and enables industry-leading performance for demanding workloads such as AI. In addition, its random reads of 3,300 KIOPS are up to 35% better and random writes of 400 KIOPS are up to 33% better than competitive offerings.

SMART Modular Technologies, Inc. ("SMART"), a division of SGH and a global leader in memory solutions, solid-state drives and hybrid storage products announces that it is now offering a new class of high performance, power efficient, data center solid state disk drives (SSDs) beginning with the DC4800 PCIe Gen 4 family.

SMART's DC4800 devices are designed with a specialized hardware-accelerated SSD controller that draws less power without compromising storage input/output (I/O) performance. Zero-induced throttling allows these SSDs to perform better under continued duress, even when they are pushed to their performance limit. This translates to significant power consumption improvement per server, as well as consistent latency performance of up to 7-nines or 99.99999% of the time.

Solidigm—the company that Intel sold its SSD business to—held a tech day last week where the company shared some details about its future roadmaps. The company appears to be focusing on 3D QLC NAND and its 192-layer product promises both larger drives, but also enhanced endurance for QLC NAND. For example, Solidigm's 30.72 TB SSD is promising a PBW of around 32 PB (Petabyte) endurance. This is using what the company calls QLC Essential Endurance NAND.

However, its QLC Value Endurance NAND is what will enable the 61.44 TB drive, which is said to offer around 65 PB write endurance, but it should be noted that this is at 16 KB aligned data or during other types of light data writes. Neither type of NAND is destined for consumer applications as of now, as Solidigm is only targeting E1, E3 and U.2 form factors. Regardless, this appears to be a huge step forward for 3D QLC NAND and Solidigm is hoping that its upcoming drives will be able to replace mechanical drives in the enterprise market space. On top of this, Solidigm also claims to offer better throughput and latency compared to its competitors, but we're still looking at SATA type level SSD performance for the IOPS. The first drives with the new 192-layer 3D QLC NAND are expected to be available sometime early next year.

The recent NVIDIA data-leak springs up information on various upcoming graphics parts. Besides "Ada Lovelace," "Hopper," we come across a new codename, "Blackwell." It turns out that NVIDIA is splitting the the graphics and compute architecture naming with the next generation, not unlike what AMD did, with its RDNA and CDNA series. The current "Ampere" architecture is being used both for compute and graphics, with the streaming multiprocessor for the two being slightly different—the compute "Ampere" has more FP64 and Tensor components, while the graphics "Ampere" does away with these in favor of RT cores and graphics-relevant components.

The graphics architecture to succeed GeForce "Ampere" will be GeForce "Ada Lovelace." GPUs in this series are identified in the leaked code as "AD102," "AD103," "AD104," "AD106," "AD107," and "AD10B," succeeding a similar numbering for parts with the "A" (GeForce Ampere) series. The compute architecture succeeding "Ampere" will be codenamed "Hopper." with parts in the series being codenamed "GH100" and "GH202." Another compute or datacenter architecture is "Blackwell," with parts being codenamed "GB100" and "GB102." From all accounts, NVIDIA is planning to launch the GeForce 40-series "Ada" graphics card lineup in the second half of 2022. The company is in need of a similar refresh for its compute product lineup, and could debut "Hopper" either toward the end of 2022 or next year. "Blackwell" could follow "Hopper."

With the launch of the EVGA E1, EVGA is once again taking extreme gaming to the next level by setting a statement with our new gaming rig. The E1 will be extremely limited and available to EVGA Members only.

Back in 1999 when EVGA first was founded, graphics cards were basic. EVGA was the first to introduce Heat Pipe Cooling and iCX Technology along with 4-Way SLI bringing more benefits to gamers. In 2012, EVGA introduced its first Power Supply. Through quality and features EVGA has become a top choice for Power Supplies when gamers are building their systems. E1 continues the tradition of top tier hardware for gamers.