Micron 9650 Reaches Mass Production as World First PCIe Gen6 SSD
Micron Technology has announced that the Micron 9650 NVMe SSD is now in mass production. The first PCIe Gen6 data center drive has achieved this milestone of beginning to ship. The drive was created to provide high speed data transfer which AI infrastructures need to achieve their training and inference performance requirements.
The upgrade to PCIe Gen6 results in double the theoretical bandwidth capacity which existed in the earlier generation. The Micron 9650 uses its additional capacity to solve storage limitations which occur in environments that require high GPU processing power. The 9650 delivers double the sequential reading performance when compared to typical PCIe Gen5 storage devices.
Performance Metric Micron 9650 Gen6 vs Standard Gen5 SSD
| Performance Metric | Micron 9650 Gen6 | Standard Gen5 SSD | Advantage Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sequential Read | 28,000 MBs | 14,000 MBs | 100 Higher |
| Sequential Write | 14,000 MBs | 10,000 MBs | 40 Higher |
| Random Read | 5.5 MIOPS | 3.3 MIOPS | 67 Higher |
| Random Write | 900 KIOPS | 720 KIOPS | 22 Higher |
AI workloads require high power consumption which makes energy efficiency the main design requirement for their systems. The Micron 9650 delivers 28 GBs throughput at 25 watts power consumption which results in double the performance per watt output of earlier PCIe Gen5 products.
The system achieves sequential read efficiency of 1,120 MBs per watt which improves performance by 2X. The Random Read Efficiency requires 220 KIOPS per watt which provides a 1.7X performance improvement. Data centers can use this system to operate with both traditional air cooled systems and modern liquid cooled systems.
Large Language Models (LLMs) and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) processes need high throughput capacity. The 9650 provides 28 GBs bandwidth which ensures GPUs receive continuous data flow decreasing downtime while increasing ROI for AI clusters. The drive enables direct data transfer between accelerators and storage systems by using peer to peer data movement which decreases CPU usage.
Version 1.0 has passed all interoperability tests which Micron 9650 completed after testing both high port switches and retimers and passive cabling systems. The drive has achieved record breaking single server benchmarks of 230M IOPS in lab demonstrations. The product has reached OEM qualification status and AI data center customer evaluation status which indicates that PCIe Gen6 technology has entered mainstream adoption.
The Micron 9650 enables AI workloads to use storage as their primary component which enhances performance while it removes traditional I O limitations for upcoming computing systems.
