Micron now mass producing the world's first PCIe Gen6 SSD: up to 28GB/sec read speeds

Micron has started mass production of the world's first PCIe Gen6 SSD, offering an eye-watering 28GB/sec read speeds and in both air, and liquid-cooled models.

The new Micron 9650 Gen6 SSD features its in-house G9 NAND flash, aimed at high performance and low latencies for data center servers. Micron's new family of three SSDs uses vertical integration and its in-house G9 NAND, DRAM, and firmware to ensure that its new SSDs pack leading performance for servers, high capacity, high speeds, lower latencies, all while consuming less power.

Micron's new 9650 Gen6 SSD has up to 28GB/sec of sequential read speeds -- twice that of the 14GB/sec capable in Gen5 SSDs -- and up to 14GB/sec in sequential writes. This means that Micron's new 9650 Gen6 SSD has the fastest speeds out of the box, but does it with 25% improved efficiency at random writes, and up to 67% better efficiency at random reads.

Micron explains on its website: "The transition to PCIe Gen6 represents one of the most significant shifts in I/O architecture in years. With bandwidth generally double that of PCIe Gen5, PCIe Gen6 removes a critical ceiling on how fast data can move between storage and compute. The Micron 9650 SSD enters the market as the world's first PCIe Gen6 data center SSD, delivering massive performance increases compared to prior generations".

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"With unmatched 28 GB/s throughput, the Micron 9650 dramatically accelerates AI training and inference workloads. During inference, high throughput is essential to enable real-time data access for large models, such as AI workloads with extended context windows and retrieval-augmented generation pipelines".

"As AI systems evolve, data increasingly moves directly between accelerators and storage, minimizing CPU involvement. PCIe Gen6 performance drives this shift by providing the bandwidth headroom required for peer to peer data movement in next generation architectures".