SK Hynix is developing a high-performance SSD for AI PCs and is moving into the on-device AI market.

SK Hynix announced on the 28th that it has completed the development of 'PCB01', the industry's highest-performance SSD (Solid State Drive) product to be installed in on-device AI PCs.

SK Hynix emphasized, “We have dramatically improved performance, including data processing speed, by applying the ‘8-channel (Ch.) PCIe 5th generation’ standard for the first time to PCB01,” and “Following ultra-high-performance DRAMs represented by HBM, we have succeeded in developing top-level products in NAND solutions, solidifying our leadership in the AI memory field.”

The company is currently working with global PC customers to certify new products, and plans to begin mass production within the year as soon as certification is completed, launching products for both large customers and general consumers.

PCB01's sequential read and write speeds are 14GB (gigabytes) per second and 12GB per second, respectively, achieving the industry's highest performance among PC SSD products. This is a speed that can run the Large Language Model (LLM) required for AI learning and inference in less than 1 second.

In addition, the company expects that PCB01 will greatly improve the stability of large-scale AI calculation tasks by improving power efficiency by more than 30% compared to the previous generation. In addition, SK Hynix applied SLC caching technology to this product. This is a technology that operates some of the cells, which are NAND storage areas, as SLC with high processing speeds, helping PC users to quickly perform general computing tasks in addition to AI services.

NAND is divided into specifications such as SLC (Single Level Cell, 1 bit) - MLC (Multi Level Cell, 2 bit) - TLC (Triple Level Cell, 3 bit) - QLC (Quad Level Cell, 4 bit) depending on how many bits of data are stored in one cell. As the amount of information stored increases, more data can be stored in the same area, but speed and stability decrease, and SLC increases the processing speed only for necessary data.

This product is also equipped with security features to protect personal information. The company’s engineers built the security solution, Root Of Trust (ROT), into PCB01 to prevent external security attacks and information falsification, while also protecting user passwords. PCB01 will be released in three capacities: 512GB, 1TB (terabyte), and 2TB.

SK hynix Vice President Ahn Hyun (in charge of NS Committee) said, “As the performance of this new product has significantly improved compared to the previous generation, we are receiving requests for collaboration on compatibility verification from several big tech companies that produce CPUs for on-device AI PCs.” He added, “We will work to smoothly proceed with customer certification and mass production of this product, which is expected to receive great attention in the market, and solidify our leadership in AI memory, the world’s No. 1, in NAND solutions as well.”