Chinese Companies Claim Breakthrough in Storage-Class Memory and Silicon Photonics

[AleksandarK]

Recent reports from South China Morning Post unveil developments in China's semiconductor industry, with significant progress in two critical areas: advanced memory chips and silicon photonics. These breakthroughs mark important steps in the country's pursuit of technological self-reliance amid global trade tensions. In Wuhan, a startup called Numemory has unveiled a new storage-class memory (SCM) chip. The "NM101" chip boasts an impressive 64 GB capacity, far surpassing the megabyte-range offerings currently dominating the market. This novel chip blends the strengths of traditional DRAM and NAND flash storage, delivering rapid, non-volatile, persistent memory ideal for server and data center applications. The NM101's design prioritizes high capacity, density, and bandwidth while maintaining low latency. These characteristics make it particularly well-suited for data centers and cloud computing infrastructures. Initial reports suggest that storage devices incorporating this SCM technology can write an entire 10 GB high-definition video file in a mere second.

Concurrently, another Wuhan-based institution, JFS Laboratory, has achieved a milestone in silicon photonics research. The state-backed facility successfully merged a laser light source with a silicon chip, a feat previously unrealized in China. This innovation in silicon photonics leverages light signals for data transmission, potentially circumventing the looming physical constraints of traditional electric signal-based chip designs. This accomplishment is viewed as addressing a crucial gap in China's optoelectronics capabilities, which used to lag behind Western chip designers and startups. Using silicon photonics, infrastructure scale-out can be sustained on a much larger scale without significant power consumption increase. While these developments represent significant progress, it's important to note that bridging the gap between laboratory breakthroughs and mass-produced, commercially viable products remains a substantial challenge. The path from research success to market dominance is often long and complex, requiring sustained investment and further technological refinement.



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[john_]

While I believe that the Chinese at some point might surpass the West at least in some areas, for now I will just don't trust Chinese numbers. They are far worst than Greek statistics.

 

[Solaris17]

Cool. I would be interested in seeing some white papers in regards to the current photonics work I would be interested in what temps look like across the field.

 

[Snoop05]

While I believe that the Chinese at some point might surpass the West at least in some areas, for now I will just don't trust Chinese numbers. They are far worst than Greek statistics.

View attachment 366492

One thing you have to admit is all the YTMC QLC drives (reviewed on TPU) being surprisingly on par with TLC drives in performance outside few edge cases, too bad its not as aparent on the pricing, but nonetheless impressive, especially compared to mainstream brands trying to sell noticeably worse QLC garbage for basically same money or more - and this situation being without change since introduction of QLC even when it was proposed as value/density offering .... if barely any cheaper, sacrificing to much to be worth it.

 

[csendesmark]

I believe when I see

Great deals bro, where did you find these?

 

[Prima.Vera]

Aren't the labs in Wuhan proven to be responsible for the release of COVID-19 to the world?
How do they expect people to trust anymore them after that fiasco?

 

[R-T-B]

Recent reports from South China Morning Post unveil developments in China's semiconductor industry, with significant progress in two critical areas: advanced memory chips and silicon photonics. These breakthroughs mark important steps in the country's pursuit of technological self-reliance amid global trade tensions. In Wuhan, a startup called Numemory has unveiled a new storage-class memory (SCM) chip. The "NM101" chip boasts an impressive 64 GB capacity, far surpassing the megabyte-range offerings currently dominating the market. This novel chip blends the strengths of traditional DRAM and NAND flash storage, delivering rapid, non-volatile, persistent memory ideal for server and data center applications. The NM101's design prioritizes high capacity, density, and bandwidth while maintaining low latency. These characteristics make it particularly well-suited for data centers and cloud computing infrastructures. Initial reports suggest that storage devices incorporating this SCM technology can write an entire 10 GB high-definition video file in a mere second.

This sounds an awful lot like they just reinvented (or just cloned) Optane.

Frankly I am fine with that if Intel was truly just going to abandon it.

Aren't the labs in Wuhan proven to be responsible for the release of COVID-19 to the world?
How do they expect people to trust anymore them after that fiasco?

Wuhan is a frickin massive R&D region in China so yeah, things are going to come out of there, both bad and good. Remember COVID-19 was linked to wild bats that they were researching (and thus in contact with), not lab wargame shenanigans as many conspiracy theorists will try to tell you. There have been disease outbreaks in US cities too from research areas. Nothing as big, but the point is R&D regions come with this risk and you should not blacklist them forever for doing what they literally are designed to do (research the unknown).