2024 predictions: NAND Flash, SSDs, AI, Security, LLMs, and more

The company predicts that rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will continue apace, with PCIe 5.0-based infrastructure providing high-performance, sustainable support for AI workload consistency as adoption rapidly expands. PCIe 5.0 NAND flash solutions will be at the core of a well-balanced hardware ecosystem, with private AI deployments such as on-premises large language models (LLMs) driving significant growth in both everyday AI and the infrastructure required to support it.    

“We are moving past initial excitement over AI toward wider everyday deployment of the technology. In these configurations, high-quality AI output must be achieved by infrastructure designed to be secure, while also being affordable. The organisations that leverage AI to boost productivity will be incredibly successful,” said Sebastien Jean, CTO, Phison US. “Building on the widespread proliferation of AI applications, infrastructure providers will be responsible for making certain that AI models do not run up against the limitations of memory – and NAND flash will become central to how we configure data centre architectures to support today’s developing AI market while laying the foundation for success in our fast-evolving digital future.”

The direction from 2023 was clear: artificial intelligence will continue to weave its way through our lives, and the primary purpose of digital infrastructure in the coming year will be to support these critical models in production environments. As AI becomes more every day, data centre architects will be challenged to sustain the proliferation of applications such as large language models (LLMs) while building systems that can maintain and scale these operations long-term.  

Phison’s data scientists and digital infrastructure experts believe that future successful AI implementation will maintain vigilance against known and unknown data threats while moving away from over-reliance on accelerator technologies, resulting in more balanced systems. Phison’s predictions include: 

• SSD, GPU, DRAM, and other essential data centre components will increasingly include device-level cryptographic identification, attestation, and data encryption to help better guard data against attack as AI deployments expose new digital threats
• Private, on-premise deployment of infrastructure for LLMs in order to run AI model training on proprietary data without exposure to security vulnerabilities associated with the Cloud
• Ultra-rapid advancements in AI and LLMs will challenge AI infrastructure reliance on GPU and DRAM, resulting in new approaches to architecture that take greater advantage of high-capacity NAND flash
• In these systems, PCIe 5.0 NAND flash will gain wider adoption to power applications in production environments at top speed and efficiency, freeing GPU, and DRAM to separately run AI inference models, maximising resource efficiency and productivity
• Private LLMs will focus initially on essential activities that are not held to strict time-to-market deadlines, such as improved chatbot interactions for professionals and incremental advancements for patented products
• As these private deployments accrue positive results, applications will be adapted for adjacent operations and procedures, furthering the proliferation of these everyday infrastructural solutions for AI

“By utilising established and emerging security strategies and embracing advancements in infrastructure hardware design, the most successful companies of 2024 will recognise that a robust and balanced infrastructure can provide tactical and strategic opportunities while furthering innovation in AI-driven data ecosystems,” said Dr. Wei Lin, CTO, Phison HQ, Head of Phison AI R&D & Assistant Professor at the College of Artificial Intelligence, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University. “As critical infrastructure evolves to support rapid advancements in AI, NAND flash storage solutions will take a central role, enabling greater architectural balance against GPU and DRAM for balanced systems built to maximise the benefits of ongoing, long-term AI deployment.”   

With one of the industry’s most expansive portfolios of PCIe 5.0 NAND flash and signal conditioning solutions for the growing Gen5 data ecosystem, Phison delivers a holistic vision for a modern enterprise data ecosystem. The company’s low-power, high-performance NAND flash and signal integrity solutions and services are fully optimised to deliver balanced, low-power workload performance for today’s AI applications and scalable to meet all the challenges the future holds.

Phison’s IMAGIN+ design services enable organisations to design highly efficient NAND flash storage architectures tailored to their specific performance needs, and its aiDAPTIV+ platform is integrating high-capacity NAND flash solutions into the heart of AI systems.