SK hynix to place custom tiny CPU cores in its SSD controllers to ease Arm load as drive speeds rocket

SK hynix has detailed plans to reduce reliance on power-hungry CPU cores with an in-house core named a Hynix Transaction Processing Unit (H-TPU). Not to be confused with an AI accelerator, an H-TPU would assist with repetitive work handled by an SSD, which usually demands more cores on a controller as drives get faster. These new cores are placed in clusters and would handle routine I/O with a four-stage, in-order pipeline, while management is left to the traditional Arm CPU. The new, tiny cores are claimed to draw only about 2.5% of a general-purpose CPU core’s power, with just around 4% of…