SK Hynix plans SSD controllers with more than 100 tiny H-TPU cores

At the conference, SK Hynix vice president Koo In-je said general-purpose CPUs inside SSD controllers are reaching limits in power consumption and area. He said the company developed the Hynix Transaction Processing Unit, or H-TPU, to handle common input/output transmission paths efficiently.

Conventional processors handle routine operations alongside demanding tasks, including reading and writing data, updating metadata, and controlling buffers. Faster storage interfaces increase those workloads, potentially requiring more processor cores and raising the controller’s physical footprint and electricity consumption. H-TPUs separate repetitive operations from complicated processing, allowing many specialized cores to handle individual responsibilities.

TechRadar reported that each H-TPU uses just 4% of the chip area occupied by a general-purpose CPU core and consumes about 2.5% of its power. The architecture uses a four-stage pipeline and sequential execution, which SK Hynix considers suitable for recurring storage operations. The controller activates only the units needed for each incoming request and places unnecessary processors into idle mode. Conventional CPU cores remain responsible for demanding functions such as error recovery, exception management, and storage policy decisions.

SK Hynix intends to incorporate H-TPUs into upcoming enterprise SSD controllers and its Storage Next architecture. The company also plans to use the technology with High Bandwidth Flash, a memory technology expected to enter the market next year. Storage Next is designed to handle smaller data requests associated with newer AI models, including transactions of 512 bytes or less, one-eighth of the conventional 4KB data unit. Future PCIe generations, including PCIe 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0, are expected to increase transfer speeds and place additional demands on storage controllers. SK Hynix also intends to extend the technology to its AIN storage portfolio, which includes the AIN P, AIN B and AIN D product families.

TechRadar reported that SK Hynix has not disclosed when H-TPUs will reach individual commercial products or quantified their effects on overall SSD performance. TechRadar said the details were via The Elec, which published originally in Japanese.