170: FMS25 wrap-up with Jim Handy, Objective Analysis

Jim Handy, General Director at Objective Analysis and I were at FMS25 in Santa Clara last week and there was a lot of news going around. Jim’s been on our show just about every year to discuss FMS news, And with the recent focus beyond flash, it’s even harder for one person to keep up.

Much of the discussion at FMS was on HBM4, new QLC capacity points, UAlink/UCe for chiplets, 100M IOP SSDs, and more. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

Th.ere was not as much on CXL as in past shows. and ditto on increasing layer counts to drive more NAND capacity. A couple of years ago layer counts were all they talked about. And CXL was the major change to hit the data center. Jim’s view (and Jason’s) was that CXL was as a way for hyperscalers to make use of DDR4 DRAM but that need has passed now.

As for layer counts they are still going up but not as fast. And the economics of 3D scaling now have to compete with 2D scaling and “virtual scaling”.

But UAlink and UCe were active topics both of which are used to tie together chiplets in CPUs to build SoCs. SSD vendors are starting to use chiplet architectures to build their massive capacity SSDs and UAlink/UCe would be a way to architect these.

SLC NAND is back to support very high performance SSDs or as a replacement for SCM (storage class memory or Optane). One vendor talked about reaching 100M (random 512B read) IOPS for a single SSD. Current SCL flash can do ~10M IOPS, next gen is speced to do ~30M and the one following would be 100M. One challenge is that current SSDs do 4Kbyte IO and it still takes a msec. or so to erase a page and reading a page isn’t that fast. But the performance is for read only activity.

HBM4 was one topic at the show but the newest wrinkle was HB Flash, or putting SSDs behind HBM to support GPU caching (SSD to HBM to GPU). This would allow more data to be quickly accessed by a GPU.

Jim also mentioned that there’s some interest in narrowing HBM access width, currently 1Kb and increasing to 2Kb with HBM4. This width, and all the pins it requires, limits how many HBM chips one can surround a GPU with. If HBM had a narrower interface more HBM chips could surround a GPU, increasing memory size and perhaps memory bandwidth. HBM4 seems to be going the wrong way but with narrower width HBM, they could easily double the number of HBM chips surrounding a GPU.

They were also showing off a 40 SSD 2U chassis using E.2 form factor SSDs. Pretty impressive and given the capacity on offer a lot of storage per RU.

Speaking of capacity one vendor announced a 246TB QLC SSD, roughly a 1/4PB in a single SSD. With 24 of these per 2U shelf, one could have a >1/10 Exabyte, (>100 PB) in a 40U rack. It looks like no end in sight for SSD capacities. And we aren’t even talking about PLC yet.

At the other end of SSD capacity, it appears that M.2 SSDs were getting hotter on one side (controller side) than the other, throttling performance. So one vender decided to provide heat (liquid cooling) pipes between the two sides to equalize thermal load.

Jim Pappas (lately of Intel) won the lifetime achievement award from FMS. Jim’s accomplishments span a wide swath of storage technology but at the award ceremony he waxed on his work on the USB connector. He said his will stipulates that once he is interned in the ground, they are to take out the casket and spin it around 180 degrees and put it back down again.

There were quite a number of side topics not directly related to FMS25 on the podcast which were interesting in their own right, but I think i’ll leave it here.

Jim Handy, General Director Objective Analysis

Jim Handy of Objective Analysis has over 35 years in the electronics industry, including 20 years as a leading semiconductor and SSD industry analyst. Early in his career he held marketing and design positions at leading semiconductor suppliers including Intel, National Semiconductor, and Infineon.

A frequent presenter at trade shows, Mr. Handy is known for his technical depth, accurate forecasts, widespread industry presence and volume of publication.

He has written hundreds of market reports, articles for trade journals, and white papers, and is frequently interviewed and quoted in the electronics trade press and other media. 

He posts blogs at www.TheMemoryGuy.com, and www.TheSSDguy.com