Today's Edition
SEOUL (dpa)
South Korean consumer electronics major Samsung Electronics announced that it has begun mass production of a new solid-state drive (SSD), which stores and transfers data for artificial intelligence personal computers.
The company has initiated mass-producing PM9E1, a PCle 5.0 SSD with the industry's highest performance and largest capacity.
According to Samsung, the SSD has significantly improved power efficiency of over 50%, which allows for longer battery life which is ideal for on-device AI applications.
Starting with PM9E1, Samsung plans to expand its advanced SSD offerings to global PC makers. The company expects to launch PCIe 5.0-based consumer products in the future to solidify its leadership in the on-device AI market.
The SSD is built on its in-house 5-nanometer -based controller and eighth-generation V-NAND (V8) technology.
According to the firm, the PM9E1 will provide powerful performance and enhanced power efficiency, making it an optimal solution for on-device AI PCs.
The company added that there is significant improvement in key attributes in SSDs, including performance, storage capacity, power efficiency and security, compared to its predecessor, PM9A1a.
The new SSD's sequential read and write speeds have more than doubled compared to the previous generation, reaching up to 14.5 gigabytes-per-second or GB/s and 13GB/s, respectively.
Samsung noted that this powerful performance enables faster data transfer even with data-intensive AI applications. A 14GB large language model or LLM can now be transferred from the SSD to DRAM in less than a second.
The new PM9E1 offers various storage options, including 512GB, 1 terabyte (TB), 2TB and the industry's largest capacity of 4TB, which is especially an optimum solution for PC users in need of high-capacity storage for large-sized files.
Further, for stronger security measures, Samsung has applied Security
Protocol and Data Model or SPDM v1.2 to the PM9E1. YongCheol Bae, Executive Vice President of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics, said, "Our PM9E1 integrated with a 5nm
controller delivers industry-leading power efficiency and utmost
performance validated by our key partners. In the rapidly growing
on-device AI era, Samsung's PM9E1 will offer a robust foundation for
global customers to effectively plan their AI portfolios."
