[DigitalToday reporter Jae-won Choi] Japan's memory chipmaker Kioxia has unveiled ultra-fast SSD technology that handles more than 20 million read operations per second. It has more than doubled performance from existing products and is accelerating its push into the high-performance storage market for AI data centres.

On Oct. 12 (local time), IT media outlet TechRadar reported that Kioxia unveiled an enhanced-performance model in its GP series and presented performance exceeding 20 million IOPS based on random reads of 512-byte data blocks. That is about double the roughly 10 million IOPS of the GP1 announced in August.

IOPS refers to the number of input and output operations a storage device can process in 1 second. The higher the figure, the more advantageous it is for repeatedly reading and writing small data.

The key to the performance improvement is third-generation XL-FLASH memory. Compared with the previous generation, read performance improved threefold and write performance improved by about 150 percent. It features reduced internal wiring length to cut electrical signal delays and an increased number of planes per memory die.

Kioxia is developing AI storage technology that allows GPUs to access large-scale data quickly. Rather than fully replacing expensive DRAM or high-bandwidth memory (HBM), it plans to use it as a high-speed storage layer that supplements memory capacity.

The existing GP1 supports PCIe 6.0 and NVMe 2.2 and has durability of up to 50 DWPD. Kioxia has not disclosed the interface, durability or launch timing of the enhanced-performance model. It is currently at the technology demonstration stage.

Kioxia also unveiled the LD4 SSD for large-capacity data centres. The product uses 218-layer BiCS 8 QLC NAND flash and offers capacities of 15.36TB and 30.72TB. By design, it can be expanded to as much as 122.88TB.

Kioxia is currently providing evaluation samples of the LD4 to some customers, and actual read and write speeds and durability have not yet been disclosed. As AI infrastructure expands, competition in high-performance and high-capacity technologies in the storage industry is also intensifying.