With the continuous improvement in processing speeds of major processors, especially in the competitive landscape of CPUs and operating speeds over the past few years, the overall development of CPU speed has largely followed Moore’s Law. However, in the last decade, CPU speed improvements have slowed down significantly. In my view, there are two main reasons for this: one is the manufacturing process, and the other is memory access. Data stored in memory is difficult to load into the core quickly. Additionally, in major design applications, the issue of memory I/O speed has become increasingly prominent. So, has there been any breakthrough in memory access I/O speed up to now?
Everspin’s nvNITRO NVMe card recently caught attention as Everspin announced their latest development based on MRAM technology. The standout feature of the nvNITRO NVMe storage accelerator card is its impressive I/O access speed—reaching 1.46 million IOPS for a random mix of 4KB 70/30 read and write operations. This speed is quite surprising and is likely the fastest in the current IOPS market. To put it into perspective, this is almost three times faster than Intel’s P4800X Optane SSD card, which achieves around 500,000 IOPS under similar conditions.
Several factors contribute to this high IOPS rate. First, the card uses Everspin’s latest high-speed 1Gb ST-MRAM (Spin Torque Magnetostrictive RAM) with DDR4 and SDRAM compatibility. Second, it includes an internal NVMe 1.1+ compatible MRAM-specific storage control IP block. Most importantly, it utilizes the Xilinx Kintex UltraScale KU060 FPGA chip to implement the MRAM controller, connecting it via PCIe Gen3x8 to the host system, enabling high-speed I/O access. It's also worth noting that the Everspin nvNITRO NVMe card was expected to be available in Q4 2017, with a usable capacity of 1 or 2GB, making it highly anticipated.
Unlike traditional NVMe cards, non-volatile MRAM offers significant advantages, such as its non-volatility, which eliminates the need for backup power. Additionally, ST-MRAM has excellent endurance, allowing unlimited write operations without errors, unlike NAND flash which requires wear leveling algorithms. As time passes, the performance of MRAM remains stable, making it a reliable choice for high-performance applications.
From the data shown, it's clear that the write speed of Everspin’s ST-MRAM is extremely fast, comparable to DRAM speeds. This contributes significantly to the high read/write rates of the nvNITRO accelerator. Moreover, the data sheet highlights that users can customize features by writing their own RTL code onto the programmable FPGA chip. This means users can program the Lintex UltraScale KU060 FPGA in the nvNITRO system to implement the PCIe interface and ST-MRAM controller, without increasing BOM costs. This level of customization makes the board very appealing for developers who want to tailor the hardware to specific needs.
In summary, the key takeaway from this article is the impressive performance of the nvNITRO accelerator card and the reasons behind its speed. When combined with previous discussions, it becomes clear that the use of FPGA is essential for achieving such performance. FPGAs allow flexible implementation of various interfaces and controllers, offering greater system flexibility and room for user-defined designs. I believe that in the future, more advanced FPGA designs from Xilinx will focus even more on flexibility and adaptability.
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