Samsung is adding zNAND-T and zNAND-I, customizing NAND flash for AI

AI applications are putting storage systems under more pressure than ever, and general-purpose NAND flash can't fit every workload. Memory makers are now building storage products made just for AI.

According to Korean media ZDNET Korea, Samsung Electronics is developing several NAND flash products optimized for AI workloads. Along with the previously announced zNAND-O, two more are in the works: zNAND-T and zNAND-I.

The "T" in zNAND-T stands for throughput. It uses TSV-stacked NAND dies, a similar idea to the HBF concept from SanDisk and SK Hynix, and boosts read/write bandwidth for data center AI tasks. The "I" in zNAND-I stands for IOPS, a measure of random performance. It focuses on frequent reads and writes of small data, such as KV Cache offloading.

Each of the three products serves a different workload, showing that NAND flash is moving from general-purpose designs to customized ones.