SK Hynix Chips: 100 Cores, Tiny Power

SK Hynix is developing advanced solid-state drive (SSD) controllers designed to manage increasingly demanding data transfers. The company's new Hynix Transaction Processing Unit (H-TPU) architecture features more than 100 compact processors, significantly reducing power consumption and chip area. Each H-TPU reportedly uses just 2.5% of the power and 4% of the area of a conventional CPU core.

This technology is specifically targeted at enterprise storage products and future memory systems, especially those serving demanding artificial intelligence workloads. By offloading repetitive input/output operations to these specialized cores, conventional CPUs can focus on more complex tasks like error recovery and policy decisions. SK Hynix plans to implement H-TPUs in upcoming enterprise SSD controllers, its Storage Next architecture, and High Bandwidth Flash memory.

The Storage Next architecture is being designed to efficiently handle the smaller data requests, such as 512-byte transactions, associated with newer AI models. As future PCIe generations increase transfer speeds, this distributed processing approach aims to manage growing demands while limiting power consumption and physical expansion. The company also intends to extend this technology to its AIN storage portfolio.