CES: SK hynix Showcases Energy-Efficient, High-Performance Memory Products

Summary:

• Core and products introduced under the theme of ‘Green Digital Solution’

• Introduction of eSSD with high-performance to solidify SK hynix’s in server memory market

• Solution to solve customers’ pain point proposed

SK hynix Inc. will showcase a number of its core and brand-new products at the CES 2023 in Las Vegas, NV, from January 5 through January 8.

The products, introduced under the theme of the ‘Green Digital Solution,’ as part of the SK Group’s ‘Carbon-Free Future’ campaign, are expected to attract big tech customers and experts given the improvement in performance and energy efficiency compared with the previous gen as well as the effect of lessening the impact on the environment.

Attention on energy-efficient memory chips has been on the rise as global tech companies pursue products that process data faster, while consuming less energy. The company is confident that its products to be displayed at the CES 2023 will meet customers’ such needs with excellent performance/watt ⁽¹⁾ and performance.

The core product put forward at the show is PS1010 E3.S, an eSSD product composed of multiple 176-layer 4D NAND that supports the 5-Gen of the PCIe ⁽²⁾ interface.

The company said that the introduction of the PS1010, a combination of the firm’s technologies, was made timely as the server chip market continues to grow despite the current industry downturn.

The PS1010 product shows improvement both in reading and writing speed by 130% and 49%, respectively, compared with the previous gen. Its performance/watt is also improved by more than 75%, helping customers reduce costs to run servers and carbon emission.

“We’re proud to launch PS1010, an ultrahigh-performance product with self-developed controller and firmware, at the CES 2023, the world’s largest technology show,” Yun Jae Yeun, head, NAND product planning, said. “This product will solve pain point of our server-chip customers, while paving the way for a stronger competitiveness in NAND business for us.“

Other products to be introduced at the show are HBM3 ⁽³⁾, a memory product with best spec for HPC, GDDR6-AiM that adopts the PIM ⁽⁴⁾ technology and CXL ⁽⁵⁾ memory capable of flexible expansion of memory capacity and performance.

The company will also present the immersion cooling ⁽⁶⁾ technology of SK enmove, which specializes in energy efficiency. The technology, designed to help cool down the heat of the servers generated during the operation, marks a successful case where the firm cooperated with other SK companies or external business partners to create new values in the semiconductor business.

⁽¹⁾ Performance per watt: an indicator of how much computation is performed per watt of power consumed.
⁽²⁾ PCIe: a high-speed I/O series interface used in the mainboard of digital devices. PCIe’s data-tranfer speed doubles in accordance with a generation shift.
⁽³⁾ HBM (High Bandwidth Memory): High-value, high-performance memory that vertically interconnects multiple DRAM chips and increases data processing speed in comparison to traditional DRAM products.
⁽⁴⁾ PIM (Processing In Memory): A next-gen technology that provides a solution for data congestion issues for AI and big data by adding computational functions to semiconductor memory.
⁽⁵⁾ CXL (Compute Express Link): A PCIe-based next-gen interconnect protocol on which HPC systems are based
⁽⁶⁾ Immersion Cooling: A next-gen thermal-management technology that cools down temperature by submerging data servers into cooling oil. This way, the total electricity consumption can be reduced by 30% compared with the existing technology that uses air to cool down temperature.