Samsung Electronics Co offered a glimpse of its most advanced memory hardware, touting improved performance and power efficiency in a bid to overtake rivals SK Hynix Inc and Micron Technology Inc in the race for long-term dominance.
The new system vertically stacks high-bandwidth memory on top of AI accelerators, delivering about eight times the performance of next-generation HBM5, Samsung said in a statement. Using advanced wafer-bonding technology, the system will also achieve more than 10 times the memory density of HBM5, while also allowing customised designs. Samsung intends to ramp up production of HBM4 in the second half of this year. It hasn’t yet offered a definitive timeline for HBM5 or this future technology.
Samsung’s technological push comes as fierce competition rages in the near-US$1 trillion (RM4.09 trillion) memory market where Samsung is trading blows with SK Hynix, which established an early stronghold in the AI memory boom, as well as US-based Micron. As the memory titans race to capture lucrative data centre contracts and scale up production, introducing next-generation architecture ahead of competitors has become vital to securing major customer commitments.
The new system, known as zHBM, underscores Samsung’s efforts to position itself as an end-to-end provider of infrastructure for the AI era. The company also introduced zNAND-O, a next-generation NAND solution built on its V-NAND technology, which it said better supports real-time, data-intensive AI applications.
Samsung also introduced the industry’s first V10 BV-NAND architecture, featuring a new wafer bonding architecture with over 400 layers. It increases storage density by almost 60% compared to the previous generation while improving read and write speeds. Alongside this hardware vision, Samsung also displayed a product roadmap featuring next-generation processing-in-memory chips and high-capacity enterprise storage solutions. – Bloomberg
