It is true that Artificial Intelligence is currently booming, and many uses have been found for it that, in truth, we did not even dream of having. But that “PC with AI” sounds more like smoke and marketing strategy than anything else, honestly… after all, you don’t have a “PC with AI”, but rather your PC connects to servers that do. generate its processes and automatisms. Anyway…
PCB01, SK Hynix’s AI-powered PC SSD
SK Hynix today announced the development of PCB01, a high-spec SSD designed specifically for AI PCs. The product marks the first instance of the industry adopting the fifth generation 8-lane PCIe interface. The company expects this latest advancement in NAND solutions to build on its successes in the high-performance DRAM ecosystem, currently led by HBM memory, and strengthen its leadership in the overall AI memory space.
The above paragraph is nothing more than a translation of part of the press release we received from the manufacturer, and it tells us, at least according to our understanding, that they are launching this product “for AI” with the intention of trying to grab a piece of the pie, nothing more, nothing less.
For now, SK Hynix is just playing around with this SSD, which is currently in the validation process for mass production, at which point it will begin shipping to customers and stores. The PCB01 offers speeds of up to 14GB/s read and 12GB/s write, which is pretty cool and makes it one of the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSDs on the market, but does that alone make it an “AI SSD”? Well, those speeds won’t hurt computers using the LLM language model like ChatGPT, but that’s a long way from being specifically designed for AI, isn’t it?
In the press release, SK Hynix also mentions that this SSD has a 30% improvement in power efficiency compared to the previous generation, but that is inherent to PCIe 5.0 SSDs compared to 4.0, so it is not exactly new. The manufacturer has also said that these PCB01s use SLC NAND Flash chips and that they feature SLC cache memory for greater durability and performance, but they have not given exact figures in this regard.
Finally, SK Hynix engineers have equipped these AI SSDs with technology called ROT (root of trust), a security solution to prevent external attacks and information falsification.
In any case, these “AI SSDs” are, as we said, in the validation phase, they are not even in mass production phase, so it will take a while to reach the market. Personally, we think it is an attempt by SK Hynix to gain notoriety and, as we said, to try to jump on the AI train, nothing more.
