[News] Samsung Starts Mass Production of Industry’s Most Powerful PC SSD for AI, Built with In-house 5nm Node

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Samsung Electronics announced that it has begun mass producing PM9E1, a PCle 5.0 SSD with the industry’s highest performance and largest capacity.

According to Samsung’s press release, the PM9E1, which is built on its in-house 5nm-based controller and eighth-generation V-NAND (V8) technology, will provide powerful performance and enhanced power efficiency, making it an optimal solution for on-device AI PCs.

Key attributes in SSDs, including performance, storage capacity, power efficiency and security, have all been improved compared to its predecessor (PM9A1a), Samsung notes.

According to Samsung, thanks to the eight-channel PCIe 5.0 interface, the sequential read and write speeds of the new SSD have more than doubled compared to the previous generation, reaching up to 14.5 gigabytes-per-second (GB/s) and 13GB/s, respectively.

This powerful performance enables faster data transfer even with data-intensive AI applications, allowing a 14GB large language model (LLM) to be transferred from the SSD to DRAM in less than a second, Samsung states.

The PM9E1 offers a range of storage options, including 512GB, 1 terabyte (TB), 2TB and the industry’s largest capacity of 4TB. The 4TB option is especially an optimum solution for PC users in need of high-capacity storage for large-sized files such as AI-generated contents, data-heavy programs and high-resolution videos, as well as tasks that require intensive workloads such as gaming.

Additionally, the significantly improved power efficiency of over 50% allows for longer battery life which is ideal for on-device AI applications, according to Samsung.

For stronger security measures, Samsung has applied Security Protocol and Data Model (SPDM) v1.2 to the product. The SPDM specification provides ‘Secure Channel,’ ‘Device Authentication’ and ‘Firmware Tampering Attestation’ technologies that can help prevent supply chain attacks involving forgery or manipulation of stored data in the product during production or distribution processes.

Starting with PM9E1, Samsung plans to expand its advanced SSD offerings to global PC makers and expects to launch PCIe 5.0-based consumer products in the future to solidify its leadership in the on-device AI market.

(Photo credit: Samsung)