Samsung Electronics is the pioneer name and the world leader in advanced cutting-edge technologies through its innovation. Now, the South Korean giant has announced today through its newsroom that it has successfully developed the second generation revolutionary SmartSSD – Computational Storage Drive with Upgraded Processing Functionality.
About second-generation SmartSSD
The new second-generation smart SSD is basically proprietary computational storage that’s embedded with Data processing functionality along with a high-performance SSD. Therefore unlike existing SSDs, Samsung’s SmartSSD can able to process data directly. Hence minimizing data transfers between the CPU, GPU and RAM respectively, and thus boosting the performance.
This technology can avoid the bottleneck that usually occurs while moving/transferring the data between storage devices and CPUs. This results in improved system performance and much higher energy efficiency.
Cut to the chase:
- Cuts processing time by over 50%,
- Energy consumption by up to 70% and
- CPU utilisation by up to 97% compared to conventional SSD drives
Importance of SmartSSD
The SmartSSD plays a very crucial and vital role in emerging technologies, especially with the growth of next-generation technologies such as AI, machine learning and 5G/6G, which require large amounts of data to be processed.
Samsung’s second-generation SmartSSD enables much more efficient data processing as compared to conventional data drives. It reduces the processing time for scan-heavy database queries by over 50%, as well as energy consumption by up to 70% and CPU utilisation by up to 97%.
Samsung in collab with AMD
This SmartSSD is being developed by Samsung jointly with AMD. And since its development in 2020 through joint efforts, the first-generation SmartSSD is being supplied to global IT companies that include video communications platform providers. The first-generation SmartSSD was recognized as an Innovation Awards Honoree at CES 2021 for its outstanding performance and energy efficiency.
“Commercialization of the first-generation SmartSSD, in collaboration with AMD, established that the computational storage market has great potential,” said Jin-Hyeok Choi, Executive Vice President and Head of Memory Solution Product & Development at Samsung Electronics.
“Powered by Xilinx Versal Adaptive SoCs from AMD, second-generation Samsung SmartSSDs enable improved CPU efficiency and greatly reduced energy consumption by efficiently integrating the computing and storage functions in data centres,” said Sina Soltani, Corporate Vice President of Sales, AECG, Data Center and Communication Group at AMD.
SNIA and NVM Express in role
Now to standardize SmartSSD technology, Samsung Electronics is leading efforts through close collaboration with the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) along with NVM Express. They seek to expand the boundaries of SmartSSD devices through technological validation for a wide variety of applications across the globe.