In an update posted to its support pages, Intel has disclosed that it had stopped development of its thermoelectric Cryo Cooling Technology that was aimed to provide sub-ambient cooling for its top-of-the-range processors. As a result, the company will not provide Cryo Cooling software support for its latest 14^th Generation Core ‘Raptor Lake Refresh’ processors, essentially making units made by EKWB and Cooler Master obsolete for the newest CPUs.

“As of July 1, 2023, development on the Intel Cryo Cooling Technology solution was discontinued,” a statement by Intel reads. “All versions of the software are provided as-is. Functional, Note security, or other updates will not be provided after December 31, 2023. No support for Intel Core processors 14th Gen will be provided. Please check with your auxiliary cooling provider for alternative solutions.”

Intel introduced its Cryo Cooling Technology in 2020 along the 10^th Generation Core ‘Comet Lake-S’ processors as it struggled to deliver competitive performance with CPUs made on its dated 14nm-class fabrication technology.

Thermoelectric cooling uses the Peltier effect to transfer heat from one side of a device to the other, creating a cooling effect on one surface. This method is compact, allows to precisely control temperature of the cooling surface, and has no moving parts, which makes it a good fit for CPUs. Thermoelectric cooling has several drawbacks. Firstly, thermoelectric coolers are generally not energy-efficient as they use power to transfer heat from one side to another and the more heat it has to transfer, the more power it consumes. Secondly, the hot part of the surface has can generate condensate and has to be cooled down itself (at least in PC applications).

Intel’s Cryo Cooling Technology used a combination of hardware, software, and firmware technology to precisely control cooling performance and therefore boost performance of the CPU. Without any doubts, Intel’s Peltier effect-based cooling did a fine job in reducing temperature and enabling higher performance at all costs. But at $350 per unit, these cooling systems were very expensive for the vast majority of users. Furthermore, they were also power hungry and not exactly quiet.

And though Intel backing out of officially supporting thermoelectric cooling is a blow to adoption of the tech, Intel’s support is not strictly required to begin with – so we don’t expect the tech to disappear entirely.

Source: Intel (via @momomo_us)

Source: AnandTech – Intel Abandons Development of Phase-Changing Cryo Cooling Tech

Hidden deep in Seagate’s financial report released late last month was a brief roadmap update for the company’s heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. As noted in the latest update, Seagate is now planning to begin mass production of its 32 TB HAMR in early 2024, which is a slight delay from what the company announced early this year. Meanwhile, the company expects to start production of 40+ TB HDDs in about two years’ time.

“Qualification and revenue ramp plans for our 30-plus terabyte products remain fully on track with high-volume ramp starting early in calendar 2024,” said Dave Mosley, chief executive of Seagate, during conference call with financial analysts and investors. ” These drives deliver capacity starting at 30 terabytes and offer customers the same flexibility to adopt either CMR or SMR configurations to further boost aerial density into the mid-30TB range.”

As noted back in October, Seagate’s Exos X24 series of HDDs will help set the stage for HAMR-based hard drives, as the latter will keep using the same 10-platter platform – albeit with new platters as well as write heads with lasers to heat the media surface. Those Exos drives will use 10 2.4 TB perpendicular magnetic recording disks and will begin shipments in the first half of calendar 2024. Around the same time — in early calendar 2024 — Seagate plans to start volume ramp of 32 TB HAMR HDDs.

Even with the volume ramp and enviable capacity, Seagate is only expecting to sell a modest number of HAMR HDDs in the first quarters of their availability. The company believes that it can move around one million units in the first half of 2024, though the firm does not disclose whether the number is limited by its ability to produce the drives, or by demand from customers who need to qualify such products before deploying them in their datacenters.

“We will start our HAMR revenue fairly strongly in the first six months of the calendar 2024,” said Gianluca Romano, chief financial officer of Seagate. “We think we have about a million unit as opportunity to be sold.”

Another interesting disclosure found in the document is that Seagate intends to start producing HAMR-based HDDs featuring 4+TB platters within the next two years, which would have them arriving sometime in late 2025 or early 2026. This is somewhat is behind the company’s optimistic schedule revealed a few years back, which anticipated 50+TB HDDs in calendar 2026. Though it’s arguably a more realistic schedule that’s in line with the development cadence thus far, especially given how development and deployment of hard drive proceeds these days.

Another noteworthy thing is that Seagate’s brief roadmap update does not mention HDDs with more than 10 platters. Meaning that the company seems to be done adding platters to gain additional capacity, at least for now. Perhaps, the company believes that increased areal density that is enabled by HAMR will enable it to offer competitive capacities and it does not need to throw in any additional disks. Or maybe installing over 10 HAMR platters is risky from yields point of view as of now, so the company prefers not to mention such a technological option.

Source: Seagate (via StorageNewsletter)

Source: AnandTech – Seagate’s HAMR Update: 32 TB in Early 2024, 40+ TB Two Years Later

As AMD is now well into their third generation of RDNA architecture GPUs, the sun has been slowly setting on AMD’s remaining Graphics Core Next (GCN) designs, better known by the architecture names of Polaris and Vega. In recent weeks the company dropped support for those GPU architectures in their open source Vulkan Linux driver, AMDVLK, and now we have confirmation that the company is slowly winding down support for these architectures in their Windows drivers as well.

Under AMD’s extended driver support schedule for Polaris and Vega, the drivers for these architectures will no longer be kept at feature parity with the RDNA architectures. And while AMD will continue to support Polaris and Vega for some time to come, that support is being reduced to security updates and “functionality updates as available.”

For AMD users keeping a close eye on their driver releases, they’ll likely recognize that AMD already began this process back in September – though AMD hasn’t officially documented the change until now. As of AMD’s September Adrenaline 23.9 driver series, AMD split up the RDNA and GCN driver packages, and with that they have also split the driver branches between the two architectures. As a result, only RDNA cards are receiving new features and updates as part of AMD’s mainline driver branch (currently 23.20), while the GCN cards have been parked on a maintenance driver branch – 23.19.

At present, AMD has not published anything about this change in driver support to their website. But, responding to a request for a comment on Windows driver support from AnandTech, issued the following statement.

The AMD Polaris and Vega graphics architectures are mature, stable and performant and don’t benefit as much from regular software tuning.  Going forward, AMD is providing critical updates for Polaris- and Vega-based products via a separate driver package, including important security and functionality updates as available.  The committed support is greater than for products AMD categorizes as legacy, and gamers can still enjoy their favorite games on Polaris and Vega-based products.

Notably, AMD is actively asserting that this is not “legacy” status for Vega and Polaris, which is an important distinction because of what “legacy” means within AMD’s ecosystem. For AMD, legacy products are effectively considered end-of-life, and ongoing driver support is retired. Which in the case of previous generation GPU architectures going legacy, AMD did not have any further driver releases of any kind planned – though in practice did AMD release a couple of drivers to fix critical security issues.

AMD’s support plans for Vega and Polaris, by contrast, still call for regular driver releases, albeit without major feature updates or performance optimizations. That means receiving bug fixes and other occasional updates as AMD sees fit to backport them to the older driver branch, but not the full scope of updates that AMD’s RDNA products are now receiving via their up-to-date mainline driver. In practice, this is much closer to how NVIDIA has handled their legacy GPU products, which have traditionally received security fixes for a minimum length of time – making for a more welcome offramp for going from fully supported to unsupported.

But regardless of what AMD is calling their driver support policy for Polaris and Vega, the end result is that major driver development for these GPU architectures has effectively come to an end, and these parts have now entered an extended support phase. AMD considers the drivers for the hardware mature, and with games increasingly taking advantage of features not supported by the hardware (e.g. Alan Wake II and mesh shaders), there’s clearly less of a need to add support/optimizations for new games to drivers for old hardware.

More broadly speaking, with the current high-end game consoles using a RDNA2-ish (DX feature level 12_2) architecture, we’re finally approaching a rather hard switch that will be leaving pre-12_2 GPUs behind. Consequently, I’m not surprised to see AMD semi-retire both Polaris and Vega at the same time – there is a clear gulf in archtiecture between GCN and the greatly reworked RDNA that underpins AMD’s more recent cards.

As AMD enacted this driver split back in September, we can already see some of the ramifications of this with AMD’s latest drivers. Polaris and Vega did not receive an October driver release (Adrenaline 23.10), and the November release (Adrenaline 23.11.1) contains only a handful of fixes for GCN cards, as opposed to the much more extensive list of fixes and new game support for RDNA cards.

Ultimately, while the remaining GCN GPUs haven’t been put out to pasture quite yet, this is clearly the beginning of the end for a line of GPU architectures that stretches back to AMD’s 2011 GPU architecture modernization. AMD has been selling Polaris (GCN 4) cards since mid-2016 – starting over seven years ago – and in practice the core compute and graphics architecture of GCN 4 is virtually identical to the even older GCN 3 architecture. Consequently, AMD has essentially been supporting that core GPU architecture for almost 9 years at this point.

Meanwhile, things are a little more short-lived for the newer Vega GPU architecture (GCN 5). While AMD introduced the first discrete Vega GPUs and video cards in mid-2017 – and replaced the whole lot of them in mid-2019 – that GPU architecture remained in use in current-generation products for much longer as an integrated graphics solution. AMD’s current desktop APUs, the Ryzen 5000G series, integrate a Vega GPU. And the same silicon is still sold in the mobile space as the budget-minded Ryzen Mobile 7030 series. So although the Vega architecture is only a year younger than Polaris, it has stuck around for much longer overall.

Unfortunately, that does also mean that these Vega-based APUs are also getting something of the short end of the stick when it comes to driver support, receiving only a few years of mainstream driver support before being deprioritized. Though as these are also the weakest Vega GPUs, they’re admittedly also the least likely to be used with new games. More critical here will be how long AMD supplies security fixes for the Vega GPU architecture, especially since GPU drivers are popular targets for privilege escalation attacks.

In any case, while this isn’t a eulogy for the final members of the Graphics Core Next GPU architecture – at least, not quite yet – it’s clear that, 12 years later, GCN’s time is finally approaching its end.

Source: AnandTech – AMD Begins Polaris and Vega GPU Retirement Process, Reduces Ongoing Driver Support

AMD has sent word over this morning that the company is extending the product lifecycle for their previous-generation EYPC 7003 “Milan” family of server CPUs. The company will now be offering the Zen 3-based CPUs through at least 2026, and as part of that extension plan, has already launched a further 6 SKUs. With these changes, Milan is effectively being repositioned as a budget server platform for AMD, offering AMD’s past tech at a discount to cost-weary customers.

First launched in early 2021, AMD’s EPYC 7003 “Milan” platform is based on the company’s Zen 3 architecture, offering chips with up to 64 CPU cores, 8 channels of DDR4 memory, and PCIe 4.0 connectivity. The platform has since been superseded by AMD’s numerous Zen 4-based EPYC 9004/8004 server platforms – Genoa, Bergamo, and Siena – but for continuity and support reasons, the Milan platform is still being offered to customers. And now, it seems, it will be for even longer than AMD was first expecting.

As of today, AMD is extending the availability of the Milan platform to 2026. All the while, the company is repositioning the platform as their newest budget offering, pitching it at customers who are on the trailing-edge of server technology and need a proven platform to upgrade to, but for whatever reason aren’t ready to upgrade to the 4^th generation EPYC platforms. In practice, AMD is trying to entice Intel Xeon Scalable customers who are looking to replace their aging servers, but aren’t ready or eager to move on to 4^th gen Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids).

Competitively, Milan doesn’t offer much of note with regards to performance or features compared to AMD and Intel’s contemporary platforms. But for customers already invested in it and who need the ability to repair or bring online additional matching systems over the next couple of years, it will remain in service.

Meanwhile, the company is also re-launching 6 new Milan SKUs to underscore its position as a budget platform. All of these chips were first released by AMD back in September without much fanfare, but now that AMD is extending Milan’s availability to 2026, they are using the moment to spotlight their existence.

The 6 new chips are a bit of an eclectic mix. The top two SKUs – the 56-core 7663P and 48-core 7643P – are 1P-only versions of existing Milan chips at a lower price. Meanwhile the 7303 and 7203 parts are new, with AMD offering ultra-budget server chips with just 16 and 8 cores respectively. The 7203/7203P are true entry-level chips by server standards, with just 8 CPU cores, 64MB of L3 cache, and peak clockspeed well below AMD’s only other 8 core Milan (72F3). However, all of these chips come with the full I/O and memory channels supported by the Milan/SP3 platform, allowing AMD to position them as alternatives to the more limited EPYC 8004 Siena platform.

Source: AnandTech – AMD’s EPYC 7003 “Milan” Receives Extended Lifecycle: Availability To 2026 With 6 New SKUs

Arm Holdings has acquired a minority stake in Raspberry Pi Ltd, reinforcing a partnership that began in 2008. This strategic investment is designed to support development of Raspberry Pi’s low-cost low-power Arm-based platforms aimed at edge computing and IoT applications, leveraging Raspberry Pi’s ability to deliver affordable, high-performance computing globally.;

“Arm and Raspberry Pi share a vision to make computing accessible for all, by lowering barriers to innovation so that anyone, anywhere can learn, experience and create new IoT solutions,” said Paul Williamson, SVP and GM, Internet of Things Line of Business, Arm.

Raspberry Pi’s single-board-computers (SBCs) for students, enthusiasts, and commercial edge and IoT developers have historically been based exclusively on system-on-chips featuring Arm cores. This is a big deal for Arm as Raspberry Pi has sold more than 40 million SBC units as of 2022, a huge number for Arm, which has not seen much success with IoT, despite high expectations of Softbank.

The use of Arm technology has been quite beneficial for Raspberry Pi’s product development, providing the necessary performance, energy efficiency, and software ecosystem to facilitate accessible computing for a wide range of users, from students to professional developers. But in the recent years competing SBCs based on RISC-V SoCs began to emerge, posing threat to Raspberry Pi’s domination and to Arm’s place in emerging edge computing, edge AI, and IoT markets.

In a bid to strengthen Raspberry Pi’s positions, Arm is infusing the company with cash, possibly trying to speed up development of more versatile and competitive solutions (either in terms of performance, or in terms of power).

“With the rapid growth of edge and endpoint AI applications, platforms like those from Raspberry Pi, built on Arm, are critical to driving the adoption of high-performance IoT devices globally by enabling developers to innovate faster and more easily,” said Williamson. “This strategic investment is further proof of our continued commitment to the developer community, and to our partnership with Raspberry Pi.”

Source: AnandTech – Arm Acquires Minority Stake in Raspberry Pi

Samsung is set to start making chips using its 2^nd Generation 3nm-class (SF3) manufacturing technology as well as performance-enhanced version of its 4nm-class (SF4X) fabrication process in the second half of next year, the company told its investors this week. Both production nodes are expected to significantly improve competitive positions of the company as they will enable it to build new types of products.

“We will strengthen our technology competitiveness through the 2H [2024] mass production of the 2nd generation 3nm process as well as the 4^th generation 4nm process for HPC,” a statement by the company reads. “The market is forecast to shift to growth thanks to a rebound in mobile demand and continued growth in HPC demand.”

Samsung’s forthcoming SF3 process technology is a major upgrade to its existing SF3E production node, which, based on the available knowledge, is only used to make small chips for cryptocurrency mining. Samsung asserts that the SF3 will offer greater design versatility by allowing for different gate-all-around (GAA) transistor’s nanosheet channel widths within the same cell type. 

Although Samsung does not make direct comparisons between SF3 and SF3E, it says that SF3 offers major improvements over SF4 (4LPP, 4nm-class, low power plus), which includes a 22% increase in performance at equivalent power and complexity, or alternatively, a 34% reduction in power consumption at the same frequency and transistor count, along with a 21% reduction in logic area. In general, it is expected that SF3 will be a better option for complex designs than SF3E, though it will enter high-volume production in the second half of 2024.

In the meantime, Samsung Foundry’s 4nm-class generation nodes continue to evolve. The company gearing up to launch its SF4X (4HPC, 4 nm-class high-performance computing) process technology, tailored for high-performance applications such as CPUs and GPUs used in data centers. This one is going to be SF’s first process node in recent years that has been specifically designed for high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

Samsung’s SF4X process technology promises to deliver a 10% improvement in performance along with a 23% reduction in power consumption. While Samsung has not disclosed the baseline for this comparison, it is likely in reference to their standard SF4 (4LPP) process. This enhancement is achieved through a redesign of the transistor’s source and drain regions, following a reassessment of their performance under potentially high-stress conditions, the application of advanced transistor-level design-technology co-optimization (T-DTCO), and the implementation of a new middle-of-line (MOL) architecture.

With refined MOL architecture, SF4X is expected to achieve a silicon-validated minimum operating voltage (Vmin) for CPUs at 60mV, reduce the variability in the off-state current (IDDQ) by 10%, ensure stable high voltage (Vdd) operation above 1V without compromising performance, and enhance process margin for SRAM.

Source: AnandTech – Samsung’s Next-Gen 3nm and 4nm Nodes on Track for Mass Production in 2H 2024

Western Digital has announced its decision to split its hard disk drive and NAND memory businesses, creating two separate public companies. According to the company, the change is aimed at refining the focus and operational efficiency of each business segment. The separation, planned to be tax-free, is slated for completion in the second half of 2024, subject to necessary approvals and customary conditions.

Western Digital believes that this separation will allow each business unit — hard disk drives and NAND flash memory — to refine their strategic directions, focusing on unique market opportunities and technological innovations. By becoming independent entities, they can operate with enhanced efficiency, each with its own capital structure, allowing for more targeted and agile decision-making processes, according to the company’s official rationale. This move is seen as a way to bolster each unit’s position in the market, driving long-term success through focused strategies and operational efficiencies.

The decision follows a comprehensive strategic review, where various alternatives were evaluated to enhance organizational value and operational efficiency. As a result, Western Digital’s board of directors decided that spinning off the company’s flash memory business makes a lot of sense. Meanwhile, the company’s announcements does not detail how exactly Western Digital plans to split product lineups and whether the new flash venture will retain all flash-based product lines (e.g. SSDs, flash drives), or will mostly focus on production of NAND memory.

“Our HDD and flash businesses are both well positioned to capitalize on the data storage industry’s significant market dynamics, and as separate companies, each will have the strategic focus and resources to pursue opportunities in their respective markets,” said David Goeckeler, CEO of Western Digital. “We have already laid important groundwork by building market-leading portfolios and enhancing the operational efficiency of each business, including the creation of separate flash and HDD product business units and separating operational capabilities over the past several years. Additionally, we now have strong product, operational, and financial leadership in place to execute this plan successfully. Each business is in a solid position to succeed on its own, and the actions we are announcing today will further enable each company to drive long-term success in the years to come.”

Western Digital obtained its NAND operations when it acquired SanDisk in 2016. Along with NAND production facilities, Western Digital got rather vast software and flash controller operations, which greatly expanded its market opportunities. Meanwhile, some of those operations were eventually merged, which somewhat reduced the company’s abilities to address certain market segment. As a result, the separation is viewed as an important step in enhancing each business’s ability to capitalize on market-specific growth opportunities and technological advancements.

Western Digital feels that the timing of the separation is right as industry conditions are improving, and sees it as a crucial move to unlock and enhance shareholder value further. The company remains open to exploring additional strategic opportunities that may arise, aiming to optimize the value of both the HDD and flash investments and assets. These additional strategic opportunities possibly include the acquisition of Kioxia, Western Digital’s NAND partner that co-owns the company’s flash memory fabs. Meanwhile, SK Hynix, another investor of Kioxia, is against the buyout by Western Digital, reportedly vetoing an offer as recently as last week. A combined Western Digital + Kioxia would form the world’s largest maker of NAND flash, making it a formidable rival for the South Korean company.

Source: AnandTech – Western Digital to Split HDD and NAND Businesses

Crucial is unveiling its latest addition to its Gen4 consumer NVMe SSD lineup today – the T500 PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 NVMe SSD. It takes over flagship duties from the Crucial P5 Plus in this category. The company had started to put focus on the high-end consumer SSD segment earlier this year with the launch of the T700 Gen5 NVMe SSD – it was one of the first to offer more than 12 GBps read speeds. The company is now introducing a T-series drive in the Gen4 segment with similar flagship credentials – sequential read and write speeds of 7400 / 7000 MBps.

The Crucial T500 is one of the first consumer SSDs to utilize the Phison E25 controller launched last year. The Micron 232L 3D TLC NAND in the SSD has been in mass production for a few quarters now, allowing the company to price the product competitively. Similar to the T700, this drive is targeted towards gamers, content creators, and professional users. While PCIe 5.0 SSDs are slowly getting introduced into the market, Gen4 units are still a sweet spot in terms of system compatibility, price, and performance for many use-cases.

The T500 is launching in three capacities and two variants – a heatsink and non-heatsink one. The 500GB version comes in a non-heatsink SKU only, while the 1TB and 2TB ones come in both variants. Crucial is promising a 4TB version next year. The company indicated that the heatsink SKUs is low-profile enough to be be used in the PlayStation 5.

Phison has been pushing DirectStorage optimizations in its high-end controllers, and it is no surprise that the T500 advertises the use of Phison’s ‘I/O+ Technology’ to appeal to gamers. Given its high-performance nature, it is no surprise that the E25 controller needs to be equipped with DRAM for managing the flash translation layer (FTL). Crucial is using Micron LPDDR4 DRAM (1GB / TB of flash) in the T500 for this purpose.

Flash pricing is quite low, with the memory industry being caught up in one of its downturns currently. While this has not been kind to the revenue numbers for the NAND flash / DRAM vendors, it has translated to excellent launch pricing for even flagship SSDs such as the Crucial T500 – starting from as low as 8.5¢/GB for the 2TB non-heatsink SKU.

Source: AnandTech – Crucial T500 Gen4 NVMe SSD: New Flagship Melds Micron 232L 3D TLC and Phison E25

The solid state storage industry has been in a well-documented slide for the better part of the last year now. With storage product demand from both the client and datacenter businesses down well off of its highs in a notoriously cyclical business, we’ve already seen the big three memory manufacturers – SK hynix, Samsung, and Micron – significantly cut back on NAND production. And now the repercussions of this downturn are starting to spread to the SSD makers themselves, with Solidigm confirming that they have laid off employees due to the industry downturn.

Responding to an information request from AnandTech, Solidigm, Intel’s former SSD business unit that is now controlled by SK hynix, confirmed that the company has recently engaged in layoffs. Terming it a ‘modest’ reduction in headcount, the company disclosed that it ‘executed a modest workforce reduction’ on Wednesday, but declined to provide further details.

“Due to the prolonged downturn in the semiconductor industry and its impact on market conditions, Solidigm has executed a workforce reduction,” a statement by Solidigm reads. “The company is offering support and severance to colleagues who are departing. We are immensely grateful to our team members who have made meaningful contributions while at Solidigm. They will be greatly missed.”

Solidigm is not disclosing their new headcount, though as of September, 2022, the company had more than 2,000 employees in 20 locations around the world. Earlier this year the company closed down its branch in South Korea and hired agencies to handle its sales in the country. It looks like the current announcement also relates to various business, management, marketing, and sales roles.

Solidigm inherited its personnel from Intel’s NAND business unit, which the company agreed to sell to SK hynix in October, 2020. Solidigm closed the first stage of the deal in late 2021 and gained control over Intel’s NAND and SSD businesses and NAND memory fab in Dalian, China. Under the terms of the agreement with SK hynix, Intel transferred some of its NAND business unit employees to Solidigm to operate as a SSD business.

At this point there has not been a public announcement of the layoffs by Solidigm/SK hynix, so it remains unclear what the full impact to the business will be. SK hynix has just released its Q3’2023 earnings report, where the company reported net losses of 2.185 trillion won (~1.6B USD), and will be holding its quarterly conference call this evening (the morning of the 26th in Korea), at which point we may find out more about the company’s plans for their struggling subsidiary. Earlier reports to AnandTech had indicated more significant layoffs had taken place, though ‘modest’ leaves some room for interpretation.

Source: AnandTech – Solidigm Lays Off Employees Due to Industry Downturn

Fast memory is crucial for the performance of high-end system-on-chips that are getting more sophisticated every year. When it comes to smartphones, the most obvious way to boost memory performance is to push its data transfer rate. Apparently, this is what Micron and SK Hynix are doing with their new LPDDR5X and LPDDR5T DRAMs that boast a data transfer rate of 9.6 GT/s.

Micron’s LPDDR5X-9600 memory devices are made on the company’s latest 1β (1-beta) process technology. They are offered in up to 16 GB x64 packages (though it is unclear how many actual memory devices these packages integrate). Micron says that its LPDDR5X made on its latest production node boasts up to 30% lower power consumption compared to competing LPDDR5X ICs made on 1α (1-alpha) technology, though this is something to be expected. 

Micron does not disclose how it managed to increase the data transfer rate of its LPDDR5X to 9.6 GT/s, which is a 12% increase compared to 8.53 GT/s, which was once considered the highest speed of LPDDR5X memory. The only thing that the company discloses is that these ICs boast ‘enhanced’ dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, although DVFS is a part of LPDDR5X specification.

“Generative AI is poised to unleash unprecedented productivity, ease of use, and personalization for smartphone users by delivering the power of large language models to flagship mobile phones,” said Mark Montierth, corporate vice president and general manager of Micron’s Mobile Business Unit. “Micron’s 1β LPDDR5X combined with Qualcomm Technologies’ AI-optimized Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Mobile Platform empowers smartphone manufacturers with the next-generation performance and power efficiency essential to enabling revolutionary AI technology at the edge.“

SK Hynix is another company to start shipping LPDDR5-9600 memory today, which calls its fastest LPDDR5 DRAMs LPDDR5T (T stands for Turbo). The new memory will be available in 16 GB packages with a VDD voltage range of 1.01V to 1.12V and a VDDQ of 0.5v. By contrast, LPDDR5X should have a maximum VDD voltage of 1.1V, so LPDDR5T is slightly out of LPDDR5X spec.

Meanwhile, both Micron’s LPDDR5X-9600 and SK Hynix’s LPDDR5T-9600 are compatible with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 system-on-chip for smartphones, the two compares announced on Tuesday. Micron is already shipping its 16 GB LPDDR 9.6 GT/s modules featuring a 76.8 GB/s peak bandwidth, so expect some of Qualcomm’s partners to use the world’s fastest mobile memory shortly. SK Hynix’s module has been validated by Micron, so the South Korean company will likely begin commercial shipments of its LPDDR5T-9600 product soon.

“We are thrilled that we have met our customers’ needs for the ultra-high performance mobile DRAM with the provision of the LPDDR5T,” said Sungsoo Ryu, head of DRAM Product Planning at SK Hynix.

Sources: Micron, SK Hynix

Source: AnandTech – Micron and SK hynix Ship LPDDR5-9600 Memory for Next-Gen Smartphones

Apple’s release of Arm-based system-on-chips for its desktops and laptops three years ago demonstrated that such processors could offer competitive performance and power consumption. On the Windows-based PC front, only Qualcomm has offered Arm-based SoCs for notebooks in recent years, but it looks like it will soon be joined by AMD and NVIDIA, two notable players in the PC space, according to a Reuters report.

While neither AMD nor NVIDIA has confirmed plans to offer Arm-based SoCs for client PCs, it will not be the first time these companies either planned or offered Arm-powered processors for the Windows ecosystem. Furthermore, this move will align with Microsoft’s broader vision to push the adoption of Arm-based processors into Windows PCs to make them more competitive against Apple’s offerings.

Microsoft has spearheaded initiatives promoting the utilization of Arm-based processors, intending to diversify and evolve beyond the prevailing x86 architecture, predominantly controlled by Intel, for years. At first, the company attempted to do this in the late 2000s but saw no major success for years. However, AMD tried to develop a competitive Arm-based SoC (but had to fold development due to insufficient budgets), whereas NVIDIA offered its Tegra processor. 

Microsoft’s renewed attempt to push Arm into Windows PCs kicked off in 2016 when the company signed a deal with Qualcomm, under which the latter produced PC-oriented Snapdragon application processors. In contrast, Microsoft tailored its Arm version of Windows specifically for these SoCs.

“Microsoft learned from the 90s that they do not want to be dependent on Intel again, they do not want to be dependent on a single vendor,” said Jay Goldberg, chief executive of D2D Advisory, in a conversation with Reuters. “If Arm really took off in PC (chips), they were never going to let Qualcomm be the sole supplier.“

That deal between Microsoft and Qualcomm is set to expire in 2024 when AMD, NVIDIA, and others will be able to release their Windows PC-oriented SoCs. But it remains to be seen what exactly the two companies will offer.

AMD, Intel’s arch-rival on the x86 CPU market for decades, may be inclined to expand its offerings. However, this move will not fit into its contemporary data center-oriented strategy. Furthermore, NVIDIA has also focused primarily on data center business in recent years. 

On the one hand, both companies are interested in making high-volume products of PCs. On the other hand, both earn tons of money on AI, HPC, and data center CPUs and GPUs, and both use all production capacity they can to meet demand for their high-margin offerings. Yet, historically, companies that solely concentrated on enterprise hardware went extinct or became parts of more prominent entities.

Source: Reuters

Source: AnandTech – Report: AMD and NVIDIA Set to Offer Arm-Based Processors for PCs

Samsung’s annual Memory Tech Day is taking place in San Jose this morning, and as part of the event, the company is making a couple of notable memory technology announcements/disclosures. The highlight of Samsung’s event is the introduction of Shinebolt, Samsung’s HBM3E memory that will set new marks for both memory bandwidth and memory capacity for high-end processors. The company is also disclosing a bit more on their GDDR7 memory, which will mark a significant technological update to the GDDR family of memory standards.

Source: AnandTech – Samsung Announces ‘Shinebolt’ HBM3E Memory: HBM Hits 36GB Stacks at 9.8 Gbps