SK hynix and SanDisk published the first technical specification for "High Bandwidth Flash" (HBF), a new NAND-based memory standard positioned between today's high-bandwidth memory and standard SSDs.
The Technical Basics
The new spec supports capacities up to 512GB, with three different bandwidth tiers ranging from roughly 0.4 to 3.0 terabytes per second, and uses a chiplet interconnect that allows it to attach directly to CPUs and GPUs.
Why a New Tier
High-bandwidth memory offers excellent speed but is expensive and limited in capacity, while standard storage is cheap but far slower — HBF is designed to sit in the middle, offering AI systems a more cost-effective way to handle large workloads that don't need the fastest tier available.
Why It Matters
As AI models continue to grow in size, memory and storage architecture increasingly matters as much as raw processing power — this kind of infrastructure development often goes unnoticed publicly, despite shaping what's actually possible to build.
