What you’ll learn:
- What’s the Future of Memory and Storage conference?
- What’s new at FMS 2024?
FMS 2024: the Future of Memory and Storage kicks off on August 6 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. It used to be called the Flash Memory Summit, which was appropriate when flash dominated the technology space they were covering. And it still is, but additional memory technologies like MRAM are becoming more popular in user and storage technologies like UFS, NVMe, and CXL, joining eMMC, SATA, and SAS.
Compute Express Link (CXL) is the one to watch this year as more products are now available. It’s based on PCI Express Gen 5—the PCI-SIG will be talking to me about PCI Express Gen 6. Though CXL targets high-performance, very large memory cloud servers, it will also be hitting high-performance desktops and regular servers tackling applications like machine-learning (ML) training instead of shipping it to the cloud. We have a webchat on CXL memory expansion if you’re interested.
It’s a bit early, but Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) and chiplets will be part of the discussions going on at the conference. Growing memory requirements and mixing different technologies in chips will require such support. It’s already being used with high bandwidth memory (HBM).
SAS continues to dominate, especially as SAS 24G use continues to ramp up. The SCSI Trade Association (STA) is now part of SNIA, and the SNIA STA Forum just announced the latest standard, 24G+. While it keeps the 24G 22.5-Gbaud signaling, 24G+ builds more robust functionality on top of the 24G standard. A good bit of it targets hyperscalers and the use of shingled magnetic recording (SMR) hard-disk drives. SSDs now represent the primary front-end mass storage. However, SMR disks are still cheaper, and the capacities continue to grow.
I’ll be at the conference in case you’re wandering around. Look for the guy with the tripod trying to convince the vendors to smile for the camera while doing a demo. We will have some of those in the next week or so, in case you didn’t get to see the conference live.
