Sandisk and SK hynix release first OCP technical specification for high bandwidth flash standardization

Sandisk and SK hynix have released the technical specification for HBF (High Bandwidth Flash) through the Open Compute Project (OCP), marking a step forward in standardizing the technology for AI inference just six months after the consortium began its work in February.

 

The specification was developed through OCP's HBF technology workstream, with Sandisk and SK hynix serving as the main contributors. Notably, Google and Tenstorrent joined the consortium during the standardization process and contributed significantly to validating the technology and helping establish the standard. The specification is meant to give companies and developers building AI inference systems and accelerators a shared technical framework for incorporating HBF technology in situations where they need more memory capacity positioned close to the processor along with higher bandwidth, aimed at improving power efficiency, performance, and overall cost of ownership.

 

The underlying need comes from how modern AI inference systems work: they require high-bandwidth memory placed physically close to compute cores, and as large language models and other AI workloads grow, so does the demand for more memory capacity near that compute. HBF technology is designed to address this by combining high bandwidth with high capacity in a single solution, helpin...