At the 2023 Yunqi Conference, Alibaba Pingtou Ge released its first SSD main control chip Zhenyue 510. This chip is deeply customized for cloud computing scenarios, and Zhenyue 510 will be the first to be deployed in Alibaba Cloud data centers, and can be applied to business scenarios such as AI, online transactions, big data analysis, high-performance databases, and software-defined storage. So what exactly is Zhenyue 510?
Zhenyue 510
Zhenyue 510 integrates a number of innovative technologies, using Pingtouge's self-developed chip architecture and the RISC-V architecture Xuantie 910 multi-core CPU system, with a large number of self-developed hardware acceleration modules built-in to effectively balance performance and power consumption. In terms of memory and interfaces, it supports the industry's leading DDR5 and PCIe5.0 technologies, which greatly improves the data throughput rate of the chip. In terms of reliability, the bit error rate is greatly reduced through self-developed LDPC error correction algorithms and medium voltage prediction algorithms.
The chip has also been deeply optimized for cloud computing scenarios. The chip and cloud storage software system are closely integrated and collaborated to effectively reduce the latency of data reading and writing, bringing higher performance to the system. For example, Zhenyue 510 not only supports NVMe's queue-level scheduling mechanism, but also implements a more refined and flexible IO-level scheduling mechanism. Combined with the cloud storage system, it can better meet the needs of delay-sensitive IO scenarios.
To put it simply, Zhenyue 510 has achieved 4 key indicators:
In terms of IO processing capability, it has reached 3400KIOPS;
In terms of latency, it reaches 4usIO execution latency;
In terms of reliability, the bit error rate is as low as 10^-18;
In terms of energy saving, each watt of power consumption can provide 420K IO accesses. Taking a data center with 100,000 SSDs deployed as an example, compared to the current mainstream PCIe4.0 SSD, Zhenyue 510 can save 2.6 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year with only the main control chip under the same performance.
Comparison with Intel Optane P5800X
Although the Intel® Optane™ data center-class solid-state drive P5800X series was released in 2020, and it is a PCIe4.0 solid-state drive, because general solid-state drives only use NAND flash memory as the storage medium, the Optane series uses 3DXPoint as the storage medium, which can significantly increase read and write bandwidth and reduce latency compared with traditional NAND SSDs. Therefore, P5800X has become the "industry ceiling" for a period of time.
In terms of specific parameters, the Intel Optane SSD P5800X series can achieve performance higher than the specification sheet under a 70/30 random mixed workload - up to 2 million IOPS.
In terms of latency, the fastest can be less than 5us, and in terms of reliability, the bit error rate is as low as 10^-17. In other words, the Zhenyue 510 clearly exceeds the P5800X in terms of IO processing capabilities (the Zhenyue 510 is 3400KIOPS and the P5800X is 2000KIOPS). In terms of latency, it has reached the level of P5800X (Zhenyue 510 is 4us and P5800X is 5us). In terms of bit error rate, although the bit error rate of many enterprise-level solid-state drives such as the P5800X is as low as 10^-17, it is considered very sufficient. But Zhenyue 510 goes a step further and achieves 10^-18.
Comparison with other PCIe5.0 solid state drives/masters
Currently, most PCIe5.0 solid-state drives/main control IO processing capabilities on the market are below 3000KIOPS.
In terms of main control, such as Yingren Technology's IG5669 and Microchip's FlashtecNVMe4016, which have reached 3000KIOPS in terms of IO processing capabilities, they are considered to be relatively excellent main control products in the industry.
In terms of solid-state drives, for example, the PBlaze77940 series and Dapuwei's Poseidon 5 series have IO processing capabilities of 2800KIOPS, which are considered to be relatively excellent enterprise-level solid-state drive products in the industry.
Conclusion
From the perspective of technical parameters, the IO processing capability of Zhenyue 510 is higher than that of general enterprise-level solid-state drives on the market. In terms of IO execution latency, it is also better than the general enterprise-class solid-state drives on the market, and only the Optane series is similar. In terms of bit error rate, it is also an order of magnitude ahead of ordinary enterprise-level solid-state drives.
So to put it simply, Zhenyue 510 is a main control chip that is deeply customized and optimized for cloud storage scenarios. It can achieve ultimate performance, stable latency under complex loads, better TCO, and higher storage density.