• SanDisk unveils Excessive Bandwidth Flash (HBF), a NAND-based mostly fully mostly alternative to HBM
• HBF matches HBM bandwidth, providing 8–16x ability at a lower ticket
• SanDisk is planning to place a technical advisory board of alternate experts

It no doubt looks as if splitting from Western Digital has lit a fireplace under Sandisk. At its most approved traders day, the flash reminiscence specialist see the wraps off sizable sizable SSDs, with the promise of even elevated ones to come support, and unveiled a fresh, more moderately priced DRAM alternative called 3D Memory Matrix.

At the comparable occasion, Sandisk also unveiled its Excessive Bandwidth Flash (HBF) thought which is taking goal at HBM by augmenting it with NAND flash to cater to AI inference workloads. Sandisk’s key targets with HBF looks to be to envision HBM bandwidth while providing 8–16 times the ability at a an analogous payment.

Essentially based mostly totally on a plug that Sandisk shared, HBF combines BiCS abilities with CBA wafer bonding, taking into narrative efficient excessive-density stacking. The firm has developed a proprietary stacking abilities that reportedly delivers extremely-low die warpage, making it that you just may per chance devour to construct 16-die stacking without foremost structural issues.

Scaling up to 4TB

The architecture of HBF has been developed over the past one year, with Sandisk incorporating enter from “major AI players” (it doesn’t name names, sadly).

The draw within the plug reveals an HBF stack, which contains more than one HBF core dies associated by contrivance of TSV (Thru-Silicon Thru) and micro bumps, interfacing with a logic die and PHY, which then connects to a GPU, CPU, TPU, or SoC die. The full stack sits on an interposer atop a kit substrate, akin to the packaging map broken-down in HBM.

HBF isn’t a straight drop-in alternative for HBM, nevertheless it absolutely does portion the comparable electrical interface, so will supreme require minor protocol adjustments, based mostly fully totally on Sandisk.

In a single other plug, a GPU with HBM providing 192GB of full reminiscence, is compared with another model combining HBF and HBM that increases the reminiscence ability to 3TB. A absolutely optimized setup with supreme HBF (that you just may per chance maintain a look on the head of the page) can scale up to a ambitious 4TB.

Sandisk’s HBF roadmap (under) reveals how the firm sees the abilities advancing all the contrivance through more than one generations, specializing in ability, learn bandwidth, and vitality effectivity. In the major abilities, HBF establishes a baseline for these metrics. By the 2d abilities, ability is predicted to broaden by 1.5x, while learn bandwidth sees a 1.45x enchancment, and vitality effectivity a minute of decreases to 0.8x. By the third abilities (there isn’t any longer any indication of when Sandisk expects to shut at this point), HBF is projected to double in ability and learn bandwidth when put next with its initial model, with vitality effectivity dropping further to 0.64x.

HBF is vulnerable to earn some ward off from rivals like Samsung and SK Hynix who are carefully invested within the $100 billion HBM market. Painfully privy to this, Sandisk is desirous to place an delivery long-established ecosystem, and also a technical advisory board made up of alternate experts and key companions.

That you just would be succesful to well also simply also like

• Micron needs an even bigger cut of the $100 billion HBM market
• Samsung HBM roadmap reveals Google will be Nvidia’s fiercest competitor in AI
• Sandisk quietly places 2TB SD card on sale – Vulgar Pro is as hasty as a inviting force

Wayne Williams is a freelancer writing data for TechRadar Pro. He has been writing about computers, abilities, and the earn for 30 years. In that time he wrote for hundreds of of the UK’s PC magazines, and launched, edited and revealed a amount of them too.