At FMS 2022 Phison announced the launch of the X1 controller based solid state drive (SSD) platform. To learn more about the X1 SSD solution and what it brings to the enterprise market, continue to our blog post below.
For enterprise data centers that can only support a finite amount of storage, Phison’s newly launched X1 SSD significantly marks the spot for innovation, efficiency, drives, and partnerships. Delivering a best-in-class performance with the lowest power consumption, Phison’s X1 is the industry’s most advanced enterprise SSD.
The X1’s comprehensive set of enterprise applications includes:
- High-Performance Computing (HPC)
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Hyperscale performance for data centers
Designed to meet the evolving demands of faster and smarter global infrastructures, the X1’s customizable SSD platform is a best-in-class combination of performance at lower power consumption that offers more than 30 percent increase in data reads than existing market competitors for the same power used.
Ushering the next generation of disruptive AI
Notably, Phison has empowered a new generation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to produce data that will rapidly scale, helping maximize business value for enterprise data centers. Widely used in technology on a daily basis, AI is a branch of computer science focused on building smart machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. Quite simply, AI is a very efficient tool that looks for data patterns, and then uses these patterns to create new results. For example, AI detects credit card fraud because the transaction pattern is outside the normal sequence for that card. The usage pattern is built up over time by examining thousands of fraud cases.
From credit card fraud detection to online support bots, advanced AI innovation continues to be leveraged to create adaptive models in a variety of important industries including healthcare, education, science and more.
Storage in AI applications present three primary industry problems:
- Large data sets. Today’s most advanced AI requires rapid access to extensive amounts of data.
- Hard disk drive (HDDs) limitations. HDDs have mechanical parts that struggle to keep pace with the data rates required to stream GPUs and CPUs with maximum performance. The very best HDD can do maybe 300 IO Operations Per Second (IOPS). Today’s best-in-class enterprise SSDs can achieve one million IOPS or more.
- Limited slots for DRAM. With current motherboards, it is difficult to load more than 4TB of DRAM into a single server. With the arrival of PCIe Gen4, SSDs now provide bandwidth approaching DDR speeds. Though an SSD cannot match the small data access latencies of DRAM, a cutting-edge design like the X1 can be used as a 32TB peer in the memory tire.
Because new applications are surfacing frequently, Phison is committed to innovation and meeting industry challenges by providing products that adapt to the evolving demands for AI in storage.
FMS 2022 Phison Demo
X1 – the industry’s most advanced enterprise SSD solution
Phison’s architecture achieves better performance at lower speeds through the use of more internal parallelism. While most enterprise SSD controllers have four to 10 large cores, Phison’s SSD has two medium cores and 32 small cores. Instead of cramming everything into giant cores and wasting time swapping between tasks, we have more parallelism (like a GPU) and give each task its own core.
In swapping between tasks, the competition compensates for inefficiency by running their clocks faster, which burns more power. Past a certain frequency (clock speed), CPUs may run faster but become inefficient. At Phison, we solve this issue by running below that threshold by having more little cores running at the same time.
Throughout the development of the X1, several engineering milestones were achieved including less power from a better SSD architecture. Three benefits of the X1 architecture:
- Because we run clocks slower and have more CPU cores, our total instructions per second are actually higher – at a lower power.
- The less energy an SSD uses, the less heat it puts off, reducing the amount of cooling needed. The result provides enterprises with more energy savings.
- With this energy efficient high-performance drive, customers can add a large amount of additional storage within their current datacenter without having to upgrade their cooling infrastructure.
Best-in-class low power consumption
The X1 features the industry’s lowest power consumption in total Watts and also in efficiency, which is measured as IOPs/Watt for PCIe Gen 4×4 SSDs. This is achieved by the X1’s enhanced architecture that leverages a small number of low power ARM R5 cores that help streamline data efficiently with less power consumption.
In addition, the X1 is more scalable. Utilizing Phison’s advanced 4th generation LDPC error detection and correction engine, the X1 provides the best overall reliability even when installed in tough enterprise environments.
The impact of strategic partnerships and alliances
The fruition of the world’s best-in-class enterprise SSD does not happen overnight or in a vacuum. Because of a close and continuing partnership with Seagate, the X1 significantly raises the bar for enterprise storage. The X1 is ready for evolving global enterprises demanding higher density, along with faster and smarter storage infrastructure. The X1 complements HHD storage to enable comprehensive enterprise applications such as hyperscale data center, high-performance computing, and AI.
Fusing Phison’s engineering excellence with Seagate’s deep industry knowledge, the X1 is the start of a renewed partnership with one goal in mind: Strengthening the industry’s enterprise-class product offerings.
With the debut of the X1, Phison continues to break away from the pack to deliver powerful solutions for a variety of applications ranging from AI, Cloud Storage and 5G edge computing.
To learn more about Phison’s X1 SSD platform, visit www.phison.com/solutions/enterprise/pcie/x1-ssd
English 
繁體中文 
日本語 
简体中文 
Deutsch 
한국어