FMS 2024: Phison Showcases Award-Winning AI Solutions, Enterprise Lineup and More

The Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) 2024 event has wrapped up and it was another banner year for Phison. From CEO K.S. Pua’s keynote address to winning Best of Show for the company’s proprietary aiDAPTIV+ technology, Phison cemented its reputation as an industry leader in NAND flash technologies and data storage solutions.

Read on for a rundown of Phison’s FMS experience.

Phison CEO’s keynote highlights forward-looking advancements

K.S. Pua, Phison’s co-founder and CEO, delivered a keynote address that focused on the future of Phison as a company as well as some of its latest developments and solutions. It outlined how Phison is always looking forward to the near future and designing products and solutions that not only meet today’s needs but also anticipate the challenges of tomorrow.

Pua spoke about the development of the Pascari enterprise product lineup and how it offers a variety of products designed to overcome challenges from the data center to AI projects to high-performance computing. He specifically mentioned the D200V SSD, which offers large capacity today and even larger capacity (up to 128 TB) very soon. He also highlighted the X200 SSD and its extreme performance capabilities that can handle even the most intensive workloads.

Phison CTO Sebastien Jean then spoke about the company’s aiDAPTIV+ technology and solutions, explaining Phison’s strategies for AI, how aiDAPTIV+ works and how it can enable businesses small or large to do AI training on-premises with their own data—without having to spend millions of dollars.

Best in Show for Most Innovative AI Solution: aiDAPTIV+ Pro Suite and technology

While Phison had previously showcased its aiDAPTIV+ technology, the spotlight at FMS was on the new aiDAPTIV+ Pro Suite, which provides the first commercial end-to-end AI experience. This suite processes data from ingress to chat in an on-premises solution, enabling organizations to maintain full control of their sensitive data. Complementing this, the aiDAPTIVCache AI100 SSD, already part of the aiDAPTIV+ family, allows businesses to train large language models at a fraction of the cost. Instead of requiring over $1 million in hardware and premium GPUs, companies can now achieve the same results on a single workstation with far fewer GPUs.

Phison received Best in Show recognition for Most Innovative AI Application with the full aiDAPTIV+ solution and its ability to democratize AI training and make it accessible to businesses of all sizes and budgets.

Reviewers at Tweaktown were impressed by the technology:

“Phison’s aiDAPTIV+ is a hybrid software and hardware solution for LLM training. It integrates Phison’s Pascari A100 M.2 SSDs into a complete solution with linear scaling. Impressive! … The best part is that it’s a cost-effective drop-in solution without making fundamental changes or modifications to existing AI applications.”

AnandTech commented:

“Re-training models by using these AI SSDs as an extension of the GPU VRAM can deliver significant TCO benefits for these companies, as the costly AI training-specific GPUs can be replaced with a set of relatively low-cost off-the-shelf RTX GPUs. … The use of SSDs as a caching layer can enable fine-tuning of models with a very large number of parameters using a minimal number of GPUs (not having to use them primarily for their HBM capacity).”

The same AnandTech article stated:

“At FMS 2024, the company took this SSD and added a middleware layer on top to ensure that workloads remain more sequential in nature. This drives up the endurance rating to 100 DWPD. Now, this middleware layer is actually part of their AI training suite targeting small business and medium enterprises who do not have the budget for a full-fledged DGX workstation, or for on-premises fine-tuning.”

 

A StorageReview video brought home the significance of aiDAPTIV+ performance:

“What’s really special about this is it’s a TLC drive being run in SLC mode—and what that means is they can do a hundred drive rates per day on this drive. Absolutely insane numbers.”

Strong showing for Pascari enterprise SSD lineup, especially the D200V 64TB SSD

Phison presented attendees with its full line of Pascari enterprise SSDs, which includes products for AI, Boot, Data Center, SATA and more. Most notable among the lineup was the D200V SSD, which is the latest offering in the Pascari D-Series product family. It’s designed specifically for use in data centers and provides up to 61.14 TB capacity in a variety of form factors. Phison CEO K.S. Pua commented that “The D-Series also allows room to scale beyond 100 TB, providing data centers with the large capacity options needed to reduce operating costs.”

One post-event article stated:

“Phison is joining the 122.88TB NVMe SSD party with something decidedly different. The company is offering a PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD variant in the Phison Pascari D200V line. High-capacity NVMe SSDs have become a big game-changer in the AI space as they can drastically cut footprint and power over hard drive solutions. The drives support sequential reads of 14000MB/s and writes of 2100MB/s. … Now, a single drive offers 122.88TB of capacity and 3 million random read IOPS.”

Phison E29T DRAM-less SSD gets its global debut

With certainty that there is still more performance to be gained in Gen4 SSDs, Phison debuted its E29T, a power-optimized PCIe Gen4x4 SSD controller featuring Kioxia BiCS QLC NAND flash technology. Designed to set new power efficiency and performance standards, the DRAM-less controller features an ARM Cortex R5 CPU core and is compatible with a flash memory interface rate of 3600 MT/s. It offers up to 8 TB of capacity and can reach up to 7400 MB/s and 6800 MB/s for sequential read and write, respectively.

A review from Tom’s Hardware stated:

“This SSD controller is targeted at upcoming NVMe Gen4 drives in the M.2-2280 and M.2-2230 form factors and is now nearly the fastest SSD controller in Phison’s lineup, beating all of them in sequential read performance and only beaten by the enterprise-grade PS5020-X1 controller for U.2 and U.3 SSDs, which has a slight advantage in sequential write performance and (of course) exponentially higher maximum capacity.”

An article from AnandTech commented:

“Compared to the E27T, the key update is the use of a newer LDPC engine that enables better SSD lifespan as well as compatibility with the latest QLC flash, along with additional power optimizations. Phison has been known for taking the lead in introducing SSD controllers based on the latest and greatest interface options – be it PCIe 4.0, PCIe 5.0, or USB4. … With the E29T, Phison is aiming to ensure that they still have a viable play in the mainstream Gen 4 market with their latest LDPC engine and supporting the highest available NAND flash speeds.”

World’s first PCIe Gen5 SSD controller aimed at mass market

The Phison E31T Gen5 SSD delivers world-leading random read IOPS performance and is suitable to use in laptops as it doesn’t need a heatsink.

An article on Tweaktown summed up its appeal:

“Described as the world’s first mainstream Gen5 SSD, it can reach impressive read and write speeds of 10,000 MB/s in a heatsink-free design fully optimized for notebooks. Other impressive performance specs include 1,500K IOPS for both read and write and a capacity of up to 8 TB. Thanks to Phison, we’ll finally see PCIe Gen5 storage come to laptops and mobile devices in a big way – with E31T supporting the M.2 2280 and M.2 2230 form factors.”

Computing performance tops 100 GB/s through Phison’s partnership with HighPoint Technologies

Through a collaboration with HighPoint Technologies, Phison put its ultra-fast E26 SSD controller to the test in a demonstration of 100 GB/s performance on a single workstation. It was the ideal showcase to tout the E26’s ability to support data-hungry applications in high-throughput computing environments.

Blocks & Files had this to say:

“This collaboration promises to revolutionize compact PCIe storage systems for x86 server and workstation platforms. HighPoint’s NVMe Gen5 x16 Switch & RAID AIC Series, when equipped with Phison-powered M.2 NVMe SSDs, delivers the world’s fastest, densest, secure and field-proven PCIe Gen5 x16 NVMe storage in today’s marketplace, suitable for a wide range of applications and workflows including Data Centers, Professional Workstations, SMB platforms and personal computing.”

Phison delivers what customers need

As a world leader in NAND flash solutions and data storage, Phison is committed to staying on the cutting edge of memory and storage technology and providing what organizations need as they implement advanced technologies into their workflows. FMS 2024 was just one more opportunity for the company to showcase its latest solutions and demonstrate how it is tuned into the challenges and needs of customers.