Samsung Electronics unveils new memory strategy... Focus on speed, scalability and permanence

(San Jose = Yonhap News) Correspondent Kwon Young-jeon = Samsung Electronics unveiled a new memory strategy focusing on speed, scalability, and permanence at a global information technology (IT) infrastructure event held in Silicon Valley, USA.

Hojun Shim, Managing Director of the AE Team of the Memory Business Department of Samsung Electronics' DS Division, announced this at the 'OCP (Open Compute Project) Global Summit' held at the San Jose Convention Center in California, USA on the 12th (local time).

Managing Director Shim explained that these strategies have become important as AI models become larger and the data and KV cache (temporary storage key value) capacity to be processed during the inference process rapidly increases, and capacity expansion beyond memory bandwidth and data storage technology have emerged as core.

First of all, in terms of speed, Samsung Electronics is preparing the cutting-edge 'High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) 5', customized HBM, zHBM, which stacks memory on top of the calculation chip, and PIM, which performs simple calculations within the memory.

In terms of memory scalability, we plan to improve data management efficiency with 'Compute Express Link' (CXL), an alternative technology that efficiently connects the AI ​​accelerator responsible for calculations and memory, and CMM-D (CXL Memory Module-DRAM)-based technology, a memory module utilizing this.

Lastly, in terms of data persistence, we seek to maximize the storage performance and capacity of large-scale AI data through the latest storage technologies such as next-generation enterprise solid-state disks (SSDs).

Samsung Electronics will display products that are key axes of these three strategies, including HBM5 mockups and wafers, through the exhibition space of this event.

Managing Director Shim said that in the process of carrying out this strategy, the company is expanding cooperation in joint design and technology verification with global customers and partners from the early stage of development.

In addition, Samsung Electronics plans to jointly demonstrate a CXL-based memory expansion solution with AMD at this event to suggest ways to complement the memory capacity limitations of existing systems.

The two companies are continuing close exchanges, with AMD CEO Lisa Su recently visiting Samsung Electronics in Korea.

According to market research companies such as Counterpoint Research and Trend Force, Samsung Electronics ranked first in the global DRAM market in the second quarter of this year with a 39% share and in the NAND market with a 29.3% share.

In terms of production capacity, market research firm Omdia estimated that Samsung Electronics is expected to be able to produce about 8.175 million DRAMs per year based on 300mm wafers this year, surpassing SK Hynix (6.66 million units) and Micron (3.6 million units).

The OCP Global Summit is an annual event where IT, semiconductor, server, and data center companies from around the world participate to discuss open hardware technology, standardization, and the direction of AI infrastructure innovation.