At OCP Summit 2023, SK hynix showed off some cool technology. We figured we would take a few of the booth (shared with Solidigm) highlights for our readers. There was a lot here, so let us get to it.
SK hynix HBM3e Memory
While not the big jump that we will eventually get with HBM4, HBM3E is the big memory topic for AI accelerators, GPUs, and so forth. There was a HBM3E die on the show floor:
HBM3e promises more performance and higher capacities, both of which are needed by modern AI workloads.
SK hynix DDR5 MCRDIMM
While this is not the first MCRDIMM we have seen, this is the first production module from a large memory manufacturer.
MCRDIMMs will be used by upcoming Intel CPUs in mid-late 2024 to increase memory bandwidth well beyond normal DDR5 scaling.
Since we are seeing more Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest parts in the wild, it makes sense we are seeing the new DIMMs here. Intel says that 12-channel MCRDIMM systems will have more memory bandwidth than the Intel Xeon MAX 9480 64GB HBM2e CPU we reviewed.
SK hynix PCIe Gen5 PS1010 NVMe SSD
Solidigm did not have a PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD on display, but SK hynix did. The SK hynix PS1010 is a PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD in the E3.S form factor.
The company also had a PS1010 2.5″ drive, but this was a PCIe Gen4 U.2 drive.
The company told us they have a 2.5″ PCIe Gen5 variant coming.
CXL Computational Memory
SK hynix did not just show off CXL memory. Instead, it had CXL-CMS 2.0. This is a Xilinx Versal VP1502 FPGA with DDR4 memory on a PCIe card.
The FPGA is used for the computation part and the CXL interface.
SK hynix Accelerator in Memory
Both SK hynix and Samsung are pushing the idea of being able to do compute directly in memory. At OCP Summit 2023, we saw a dual Xilinx Virtex XCVU7P card where each FPGA had eight AiM modules.
Here is a close-up of the memory that has some compute functions built in.
The idea is that by doing some common operations directly in memory, data does not have to move off package and thus it increases performance and saves power.
SK hynix had a demo screen with how this works.
Final Words
Overall SK hynix had some very cool technology on display. There was some like the PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD that is around for 2023, but a lot of it is future technology that we will see in 2024 and beyond making it a cool booth to visit.
It was a busy day 1 at OCP Summit that ended around 11PM. We will have more from the show over the next couple of days.
