PCIe 6.0 doubles bandwidth over PCIe 5.0, enabling storage to feed accelerators directly and cut CPU involvement in data transfers, a crucial upgrade for data pipelines in AI models with large context windows.

Micron has mass-produced the first PCIe 6.0 solid-state drives, with the 9650 NVMe SSD positioned as the market’s initial PCIe 6.0 offering.

Initial availability of the 9650 is limited to hyperscalers and large AI data-center operators, rather than broad enterprise markets.

The 9650 targets AI inference workloads, delivering up to 28,000 MB/s sequential read and 14,000 MB/s sequential write, with random IOPS of 5.5 million read and 900 thousand write.

The 9650 offers better performance per watt than PCIe 5.0 drives at similar power, delivering roughly double the sequential read efficiency, underscoring power efficiency in high-performance AI environments.

The products are optimized for AI workloads and data-center deployments, signaling a focus on high-bandwidth, low-latency storage for enterprise use.

The drive is designed for accelerator-fed data pipelines in hyperscale data centers, not as a general-purpose storage solution.

The shift toward direct storage-to-accelerator data paths reflects growing demands in AI training and inference within data centers.

Read speeds of the new PCIe 6.0 SSDs reach up to 28 GB/s, double the performance of PCIe 5.0 SSDs.

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