Tachyum Targets 16KB QLC NAND Flash Page and Indirection Unit

Tachyum^® today announced that the Prodigy^® software distribution package and pre-configured applications will be optimized for 64KB pages for Linux and 16KB Indirection Unit (IU) for solid state drives in advance of QLC NAND flash eventual replacement for HDDs in the data center. This achievement ensures that Prodigy-enabled systems will support future QLC NAND flash, networking requirements and make 16KB storage networking stack much more efficient for 1.6T Ethernet in servers.

Tachyum storage technology supports CEPH, an open-source software storage platform that is being optimized for 64KB pages and 16KB IU SSDs. With future networking expected to enable jumbo frames (9,000-9,216 bytes) and potentially super jumbo frames (17KB), the company’s optimization satisfies the reliability and high-performance needs while reducing costs.

Real-world SSD IU testing shows that these workloads allow more efficient data granularity and enable very large SSD capacities. While SSD is only twice as expensive as HDD today, QLC reduces costs further but has lower endurance. Moving from 4KB Low-Density Parity Check (LDPC) error correction to 16KB improves QLC reliability considerably.

Flash pages have already moved to 16KB. The 16KB IU reduces DRAM need for high performance SSD by a factor of 4. The 32TB SSD would need 32GB of DRAM, which is large and expensive with 4KB IU but only 8GB on a single 32GB DDR5 dual-die package of 2 DRAM chips. Kioxia and WD just unveiled a 2 terabit (Tb) QLC die delivering 4 TB in a 11.5mm x 13.5mm x 1.5mm package. With next year’s 420-plus layer NAND die, Samsung will also likely be moving to a 2Tb die, and nothing prevents Micron from introducing a 2Tb die within the year, followed by SK Hynix and YMTC. The increased density will drive 16TB E1.S SSDs to become a volume product by next year.

The 2Tb QLC flash will double storage system capacity at the same power and in the same footprint. The 2Tb die will reduce the cost per GB of flash storage systems dramatically, since the unchanged cost of storage systems excluding flash will be amortized against the doubled flash storage capacity, delivering 2x higher capacity at the same cost. In addition, as we continue our analysis of industry trends, we expect 4Tb QLC die to be feasible next year, making today’s 4KB IU unsustainable and forcing the transition to 16KB IU, with Prodigy fully prepared for the transition.

“Tachyum has core SandForce and Skyera team members who are experts in NAND flash storage,” said Dr. Radoslav Danilak, founder and CEO of Tachyum. “The Tachyum engineering team previously delivered SandForce flash controllers, as well as storage appliances at Skyera with compression, so extending this technology to data center level is simply evolutionary for the team. This ensures Prodigy will be able to handle the toughest workloads not only today but into the future as well.”

As a Universal Processor offering industry-leading performance for all workloads, Prodigy-powered data center servers can seamlessly and dynamically switch between computational domains (such as AI/ML, HPC, and cloud) with a single homogeneous architecture. By eliminating the need for expensive dedicated AI hardware and dramatically increasing server utilization, Prodigy reduces CAPEX and OPEX significantly while delivering unprecedented data center performance, power, and economics. Prodigy integrates 192 high-performance custom-designed 64-bit compute cores, to deliver up to 4.5x the performance of the highest-performing x86 processors for cloud workloads, up to 3x that of the highest performing GPU for HPC, and 6x for AI applications.

Follow Tachyum

https://twitter.com/tachyum

https://www.linkedin.com/company/tachyum

https://www.facebook.com/Tachyum/

About Tachyum

Tachyum is transforming the economics of AI, HPC, public and private cloud workloads with Prodigy, the world’s first Universal Processor. Prodigy unifies the functionality of a CPU, a GPU, and a TPU in a single processor to deliver industry-leading performance, cost and power efficiency for both specialty and general-purpose computing. As global data center emissions continue to contribute to a changing climate, with projections of their consuming 10 percent of the world’s electricity by 2030, the ultra-low power Prodigy is positioned to help balance the world’s appetite for computing at a lower environmental cost. Tachyum received a major purchase order from a US company to build a large-scale system that can deliver more than 50 exaflops performance, which will exponentially exceed the computational capabilities of the fastest inference or generative AI supercomputers available anywhere in the world today. When complete in 2026, the Prodigy-powered system will deliver a 25x multiplier vs. the world’s fastest conventional supercomputer – built just this year – and will achieve AI capabilities 25,000x larger than models for ChatGPT4. Tachyum has offices in the United States and Slovakia. For more information, visit https://www.tachyum.com/.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240709578030/en/