HBF: High Bandwidth Flash for AI Inferencing

These sources and patent discuss SanDisk's development of High Bandwidth Flash (HBF), a technology designed to address the significant memory and bandwidth demands of artificial intelligence models, particularly at the edge, such as on smartphones. The first article details a presentation by SanDisk's Alper Ilkbahar, who introduced HBF as a NAND-based memory solution that mimics High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) but offers significantly greater capacity at a similar cost, enabling massive AI models like GPT-4 to run on a single GPU or even allowing large mixture-of-experts models to function on a smartphone. The second article highlights a crucial development: SanDisk is collaborating with SK hynix, the market leader in HBM, to standardize the HBF specification, which is critical for creating a multi-supplier ecosystem and accelerating the commercial adoption of HBF for future AI workloads. Ultimately, both articles focus on HBF's potential to disrupt the memory industry by providing high-speed, high-capacity memory necessary for next-generation, memory-bound AI applications.