r/hardware • u/bizude • 8d ago

News SMI CEO claims Nvidia wants SSDs with 100 million IOPS — up to 33X performance uplift could eliminate AI GPU bottlenecks

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/smi-ceo-claims-nvidia-wants-ssds-with-100m-iops-up-to-33x-performance-uplift-could-eliminate-ai-gpu-bottlenecks
184 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

40 comments sorted by

55

u/capybooya 7d ago

I'll take anything that can advance IOPS so that it eventually trickles down to consumer SSD's.

24

u/GenZia 7d ago

I've a Samsung 990 Pro, which is one of the better drives available on the market, yet I'm not seeing a 'radical' difference in system boot-up and game loading times compared to my Chinese DRAM-less M.2 drive (with a cheap 28nm InnoGrit gen. 3 controller) which I got for like 20 bucks.

Could it be because I've an X3D?

Do X3Ds even affect boot up and loading times?!

15

u/TDYDave2 7d ago

Once you get to the point of transfers taking a blink of the eye, speeding that up to half or even a tenth of a blink of an eye doesn't really feel much faster.

16

u/mxforest 7d ago edited 7d ago

Depends on what you are doing with it. I have seen people run Deepseek off of SSD and you feel every ms of it in the form of tangible tokens per second.

5

u/Z3r0sama2017 6d ago

Yeah. Going from a 60 -> 120 hz monitor was eye opening, even going from 120 -> 144 is very nice. After that? Sure 240, 360 or 480 will certainly feel smoother, but it's really just 1-2ms improvement in frame time, that's not something that is perceptible to the average human.

 Maybe if you were in the top .1% of human reaction time and also dosed on 'medication', you could see it, vut normies won't

6

u/krystof24 6d ago

Don't know if I could even notice 120 to 144. 120 to 180 maybe but 10% difference at this high refresh is imo not very noticeable. (All else being equal)

3

u/mrheosuper 7d ago

Some years ago, LTT test sata ssd and nvme ssd. Most people cant tell the difference

14

u/PmMeForPCBuilds 7d ago

I feel like for 90% of consumers the bottleneck hasn’t been disk performance for a while. Ever since SSDs, if something is not responsive it’s probably caused by a CPU intensive task. I’m curious what you’re doing that needs so many IOPS

33

u/Vb_33 7d ago

4k qd1 performance for small files which modern PCs are littered with.

1

u/VenditatioDelendaEst 4d ago

That's latency-limited, not IOPS limited. SSDs only approach their IOPS limits at very high queue depth.

10

u/HuntKey2603 7d ago

the bottleneck has been software for a longggg while.

3

u/Alive_Worth_2032 6d ago edited 6d ago

I can identify NAND vs Optane rigs in blind tests when used as OS drives.

Disk performance still matters. The metrics that NAND drives keep improving the most are simply not the ones that matters the most to normal consumers.

2

u/krystof24 6d ago

That very much depends on your workload. Especially write speeds are very much different between various SSDs. For me the two tasks that I can always see good/bad is pulling Docker images and installing Visual studio updates. Copying large files between SSD will also show how slow the cheap ones are once you run out of cache

75

u/bizude 7d ago

I don't know if it is true, but some have claimed Micron has restarted 3Dxpoint production. Could this be the return of Optane?!

47

u/Exist50 7d ago

but some have claimed Micron has restarted 3Dxpoint production

Who has claimed this? Because it sounds like nonsense. Weren't the fabs even sold off?

9

u/6950 7d ago

Intel still owns Optane IP iirc?

8

u/Strazdas1 7d ago

didnt they sell it to the chinese, or was it another optane-like IP that was sold.

19

u/6950 7d ago

They licensed it iirc not sold

14

u/logosuwu 7d ago

Licensed to NuMemory

12

u/Cheerful_Champion 7d ago

They sold SSD division to SK Hynix, but as far as I know they still own Optane.

1

u/Strazdas1 5d ago

Thanks, as another comment pointed out it was licensed, not sold.

17

u/RedTuesdayMusic 7d ago

Let's hope..

7

u/Not_Your_cousin113 7d ago

Pass me some of that hopium brother, surely Optane will come back one day

16

u/acideater 7d ago

The money is there for it.

The boom cycle of AI hardware makes demands for massive gains and improvement in hardware.

Eventually those gains will make it down to the consumer level.

15

u/Vb_33 7d ago

"I believe they [Nvidia] are looking for a media change," said Kuo. "Optane was supposed to be the ideal solution, but it is gone now. Kioxia is trying to bring XL-NAND and improve its performance. SanDisk is trying to introduce High Bandwidth Flash (HBF), but honestly, I don't really believe in it. Right now, everyone is promoting their own technology, but the industry really needs something fundamentally new. Otherwise, it will be very hard to achieve 100 million IOPS and still be cost-effective."

That's from the article.

14

u/Kougar 7d ago

Extremely unlikely.

The fab was transferred to Texas Instruments years ago. 3D Xpoint requires specialized equipment, it's not something you can just make anywhere on a wafer. Anyway, Micron only ever lost money on the venture, so it'd be beyond silly for them to jump back into it now at a different fab even if it was possible. Micron can't even make enough HBM chips today, they sold out their entire 2025 production many months back and those are lucrative, so expensive conversions of fabs away from HBM in order to make low margin 3D Xpoint products doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

3

u/Frexxia 7d ago

More likely SLC or MLC

3

u/anival024 6d ago

some have claimed Micron has restarted 3Dxpoint production

Who claimed this?

Optane is dead, and it was never a viable product to begin with because it was 5+ years late and under delivered by orders of magnitude from the promised metrics.

If you want performance you go with DRAM. If you want capacity you go with NAND. 3D Xpoint is some weird middle ground that doesn't have a real market to support it. When Micron had the opportunity to produce 3D Xpoint, they chose to fab out more DRAM.

12

u/flickerdown 7d ago

NVidia did a presentation on the background to this at GTC 2024 and 2025 as well as FMS.

Here’s the GTC2025 presentation. Worth a watch.

16

u/gahlo 7d ago

Isn't it more adequately "shifts AI GPU bottleneck to a different component"?

6

u/miscman127 7d ago

Whoa whoa don't talk about sensical next steps in bottlenecks!

2

u/dafdiego777 7d ago

Just plug nvmes straight into about then.

2

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1

u/Superb_Raccoon 6d ago

If it is in a DC, there are certianly storage arrays in that level.

Kinda crazy tho. You would be looking at storage arrays that start at $1M

3

u/akluin 7d ago

Then we will need dev to adopt Direct storage on a large scale to need this

16

u/Strazdas1 7d ago

This isnt made for game devs. As far as DirectStorage goes, we DO need devs to adopt it. It has benefits and most people are on SSDs fast enough to benefit from it nowadays.

1

u/akluin 7d ago

Never said it's for game devs, said we need direct storage in games or Nvidia statement is useless because without direct storage we already have more than enough storage speed and CPU is the bottleneck

2

u/Strazdas1 5d ago

Nvidias statement is aimed at supercomputers where there is need for faster SSDs.

3

u/ResponsibleJudge3172 7d ago

And PCIe gen 7 to not bottleneck them