Memory manufacturer Micron recently announced the launch of the world's first solid-state drive based on the PCIe 6.0 protocol. This solid-state drive is the Micron 9650 NVMe SSD. Obviously, this is also a high-performance product specially built for data centers by Micron. The PCIe 6.0 protocol has been officially released as early as 2022. However, due to technical thresholds such as controller design, signal integrity, and platform support, the relevant final products will not be officially mass-produced until 2026. Micron's 9650 also announced that the PCIe 6.0 solid-state drive is officially commercially available.
This SSD is mainly about improving performance, with sequential read speeds of up to 28GB/sec (PCIe 5.0 SSDs typically run at 14GB/sec) and sequential write speeds of up to 14GB/sec (PCIe 5.0 SSDs typically run at 10GB/sec).
In terms of random read and write performance, the PCIe 6.0 protocol is also much improved compared to the PCIe 5.0 protocol. The random read performance of the Micron 9650 is 5.5 million IOPS and the random write performance is 900,000 IOPS, which are 67% and 22% higher than the previous generation products.
The significance of performance improvement is not just about the numbers themselves. Large language models need to continuously load massive parameters and context data from storage devices during training and inference. Long context models and the Retrieval Enhanced Generation (RAG) architecture also require storage devices to respond to queries quickly and intensively.
Therefore, the Micron 9650 solid-state drive based on the PCIe 6.0 protocol can eliminate the I/O bottleneck between GPU computing and data throughput, which should help significantly improve the performance of large language models, that is, it can respond faster and provide higher concurrency.
In terms of power consumption, the Micron 9650 SSD has a maximum power consumption of 25W, which is similar to the power consumption of the previous generation of data center-grade SSDs, but its performance per watt is significantly improved. With the same power consumption, its read performance is doubled, which helps data centers improve overall computing efficiency in power-constrained environments.
Micron also provides air-cooling and liquid-cooling heat dissipation solutions for the 9650. That is, the temperature of the controller and chip of modern data center solid-state drives is very high due to their extremely high performance and high-frequency reading and writing. When the temperature reaches a certain threshold, frequency reduction may be triggered, so the liquid cooling solution can enhance heat dissipation to ensure that the solid-state drive can continue to provide stable performance.
In terms of specifications, since it is a solid-state drive for data centers, Micron 9650 only provides E1.S and E3.S specifications (both EDSFF specifications, with higher heat dissipation requirements), and does not provide U.2 specifications. However, perhaps Micron will also launch U.2 specifications in the future to help data center operators use existing hardware to quickly transform equipment to improve performance.
Unfortunately, PCIe 6.0 solid-state drives are currently mainly targeted at enterprises and data centers. It may take some time for home consumer-grade PCIe 6.0 solid-state drives to be launched, and the price of such solid-state drives may be very, very high.