Kioxia showcases CXL-based storage devices at Flash Memory Summit 2023
I have been following Kioxia’s CXL developments closely, so it was exciting to see the company’s latest storage solutions at the Flash Memory Summit 2023. While the company unveiled its first CXL SSD a few months ago, the latest products use both BiCS 3D NAND and XL-Flash to enable higher capacities and even more impressive performance.
The CXL devices from Kioxia come in two lineups: XL-Flash-based products for performance-centric applications and BiCS 3D NAND-powered devices for capacity-hungry applications. Both lines use special controllers and CXL protocols that enable low latency and high performance.
The company showcased a 1.3 TB CXL 1.1/CXL 2.0 BiCS 3D NAND-based device in an E1.S form-factor. Unfortunately, it didn’t provide any performance numbers, but the internal pictures look very similar to the 1 TB model we wrote about before. The device uses a PCIe x4 interface, which isn’t very surprising given the capacity.
Kioxia is more conservative when it comes to the performance of its XL-Flash-based storage solutions. In fact, the company claims that its solutions will offer even higher performance compared to mainstream 3D NAND. As a reminder, XL-Flash is Kioxia’s proprietary storage media based on 1st Generation and 2nd Generation architectures. The former offers lower latency and higher parallelism, whereas the latter is more cost-effective and enables higher capacities.
Kioxia hasn’t announced any shipping dates yet, but it seems likely that the 3D NAND-based devices will arrive earlier. The company used a product display to show off the devices, and the main slide above shows the 2 TB 3D NAND device.
Keep an eye on Kioxia’s CXL solutions for a variety of workloads.
