Kioxia CD9P Performance by CPU Architecture
Now that we are firmly in the PCIe Gen5 era, we have a number of AMD, Intel, and even AmpereOne platforms to test the drives in to see the differences in performance based on architecture. These are small, but important.
Since that is hard to read, we have a zoomed-in view below without a 0 X-axis.
Again notable in this edition is the Xsight Labs E1 DPU. We also added the Intel Xeon 6 generation, and the AMD EPYC “Sorano” and Threadripper WX9000 series over the last quarter. Still, the Xsight Labs E1 DPU was perhaps the most exciting because part of what we did was actually work with the firmware team there to get it running. The DPU is designed to put 8x PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs over its 800Gbps links, as we saw with the Xsight Labs E1 800G 64-Core Arm DPU Shown for Hammerspace AI Storage.
We also have some numbers for the NVIDIA Grace CPU but the bigger question is whether we keep doing this now that we have Vera. When we started doing multi-architecture testing years ago, it was a mostly Intel Xeon world with some AMD EPYC. Now, with so many architectures, and more coming every quarter, this is becoming even more important.
Final Words
Our lab results show the CM9-R delivers sequential writes at just over 11.3GB/s, a big jump from the CD9P-R’s 7.23GB/s. In 4K random and mixed workloads, the drive actually performed better than we expected for a 1 DPWD read-focused SSD. Just because it is read-focused does not mean that it is slow at writes. We also had the opportunity to preview our new results visualization tool that we are still working on, but it is looking good now. We also saw the huge gains you would get over a 5-ish-year-old drive, which matters for those planning a refresh upgrade cycle.
Usually, as we start to see platforms come out for the next PCIe generation, we get a wave of SSDs that offer huge performance for existing platforms. The Kioxia CM9-R is a really fast drive as part of this later in the PCIe Gen5 lifecycle wave. You can clearly see the maturity of PCIe Gen5 drives and controllers with the CM9-R performing so well.
