The past few years have seen Intel and AMD delivering new processors in a staggered manner. In the sub-45W category, Intel's incumbency has allowed it to deliver products for both the notebook and ultra-compact form factor (UCFF) within a few months of each other. On the other hand, AMD's focus has been on the high-margin notebook market, with the chips filtering down to the desktop market a year or so down the road. In this context, AMD's Cezanne (most SKUs based on the Zen 3 microa

Among the groups with a presence at this years Flash Memory Summit is the UCIe Consortium, the recently formed group responsible for the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) standard . First unveiled back in March, the UCIe Consortium is looking to establish a universal standard for connecting chiplets in future chip designs, allowing chip builders to mix-and-match chiplets from different companies. At the time of the March announcement, the group was looking for additional members as i

As the 2022 Flash Memory Summit continues, SK hynix is the latest vendor to announce their next generation of NAND flash memory at the show. Showcasing for the first time the companys forthcoming 238 layer TLC NAND, which promises both improved density/capacity and improved bandwidth. At 238 layers, SK hynix has, at least for the moment, secured bragging rights for the greatest number of layers in a TLC NAND die though with mass production not set to begin until 2023, its going to be a while un

Although Intel is no longer directly in the SSD market these days, their SSD team and related technologies continue to live on under the SK hynix umbrella as Solidigm . Since their initial formation at the very end of 2021, Solidigm has been in the process of reestablishing their footing, continuing to sell and support Intels previous SSD portfolio while continuing development of their next generation of SSDs. On the enterprise side of matters this recently culminated in the launch of their new

While its technically still the new kid on the block, the Compute Express Link (CXL) standard for host-to-device connectivity has quickly taken hold in the server market. Designed to offer a rich I/O feature set built on top of the existing PCI-Express standards most notably cache-coherency between devices CXL is being prepared for use in everything from better connecting CPUs to accelerators in servers, to being able to attach DRAM and non-volatile storage over whats physically still a PCIe i

Phison and Seagate have been collaborating on SSDs since 2017 in the client as well as SMB/SME space. In April 2022 , they had announced a partnership to develop and distribute enterprise NVMe SSDs. At the Flash Memory Summit this week, the results of the collaboration are being announced in the form of the X1 SSD platform - an U.3 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD that is backwards compatible with U.2 slots. The X1 SSD utilizes a new Phison controller exclusive to Seagate - the E20. It integrates two ARM Co

With the 2022 Flash Memory Summit taking place this week, not only is there a slew of solid-state storage announcements in the pipe over the coming days, but the show is also increasingly a popular venue for discussing I/O and interconnect developments as well. Kicking things off on that front, this afternoon the OpenCAPI and CXL consortiums are issuing a joint announcement that the two groups will be joining forces, with the OpenCAPI standard and the consortiums assets being transferred to the

Storage bridges have become an ubiquitous part of today's computing ecosystems. The bridges may be external or internal, with the former ones enabling a range of direct-attached storage (DAS) units. These may range from thumb drives using an UFD controller to full-blown RAID towers carrying Infiniband and Thunderbolt links. From a bus-powered DAS viewpoint, Thunderbolt has been restricted to premium devices, but the variants of USB 3.2 have emerged as mass-market high-performance alternative

As far as top-tier CPU SKUs go, Intel's Core i9-12900KS processor sits in noticeably sharp In contrast to the launch of AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor with 96 MB of 3D V-Cache. Whereas AMD's over-the-top chip was positioned as the world's fastest gaming processor, for their fastest chip, Intel has kept their focus on trying to beat the competition across the board and across every workload. As the final 12th Generation Core (Alder Lake) desktop offering from Intel, the Core i9-1

In what is likely the final months prior to AMD launching its highly anticipated Ryzen 7000 processors , its longstanding AM4 platform has had a long and successful run. Back from the original Ryzen days with X370, all the way to today's current AM4 chipsets including both X570 and B550, there's a wide variety of models to choose from for Ryzen 5000 processors. Despite readying up a new socket for its Ryzen 7000 lineup with support for DDR5 memory only, AMD confirmed that the AM4 chipset

It appears that the end may be in sight for Intels beleaguered Optane memory business. Tucked inside a brutal Q22022 earnings release for the company (more on that a bit later today) is a very curious statement in a section talking about non-GAAP adjustments: In Q2 2022, we initiated the winding down of our Intel Optane memory business. As well, Intels earnings report also notes that the company is taking a $559 Million Optane inventory impairment charge this quarter. Beyond those two items, the

In the lead up to the Flash Memory Summit next week, many vendors have started announcing their new products. Today, Silicon Motion is unveiling their first enterprise-focused PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD controllers set. These controllers find themselves embedded in a flexible turnkey solutions platform encompassing different EDSFF standards. A follow-up to the SM8266 introduced in November 2020 , the SM8366 and SM8308 belong to Silicon Motion's 3 rd Generation enterprise NVMe controller family. Silic

Data storage requirements have kept increasing over the last several years. While SSDs have taken over the role of the primary drive in most computing systems, hard drives continue to be the storage media of choice in areas dealing with large amount of relatively cold data. Hard drives are also suitable for workloads that are largely sequential and not performance sensitive. The $/GB metric for SSDs (particularly with QLC in the picture) is showing a downward trend, but it is still not low enoug

The summer is here and a number of retailers are getting prepared for a wave of new processor releases set for the end of the year. This means there are plenty of motherboards from chipsets such as Intel's Z690, B660, and H660 that are either currently on offer, or at their lowest price for months. Users looking to build a new system today will find plenty of options from Intel's 12th Gen Core series, including the very affordable but competitive Core i3-12100 ($130), with more performan

Ahead of next weeks Flash Memory Summit, Micron this morning is announcing that their next-generation 232 layer NAND has begun shipping. The sixth generation of Microns 3D NAND technology, 232L is slated to offer both improved bandwidth and larger die sizes most notably, introducing Microns first 1Tbit TLC NAND dies, which at this point are the densest in the industry. According to the company, the new NAND is already shipping to customers and in Crucial SSD products in limited volumes, with fu