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

What happened

SK hynix has detailed plans for an in-house core named a Hynix Transaction Processing Unit (H-TPU), intended to reduce reliance on power-hungry CPU cores. The plan was presented by Koo In-jae, the company's VP of SoC design, at ISOCC 2026 (the International SoC Design Conference), and remains a plan rather than a shipping product: H-TPU has yet to be proven in an actual enterprise SSD controller product, and no date has been given. The H-TPU uses a four-stage, in-order pipeline, is placed in clusters to handle repetitive tasks such as read/write command processing, metadata management and buffer control, with more than 100 H-TPUs in total; management remains with the traditional Arm CPU, making it an offload rather than a replacement. The cores are claimed to draw only about 2.5% of a general-purpose CPU core's power, with around 4% of its area (the CPU core used for comparison is not named). The reported cause is that SSD controller CPUs are at their limit on power and area, and PCIe bandwidth doubles every generation while controller CPU clocks and control capability reportedly cannot keep up. SK hynix reportedly plans to apply H-TPU across its NAND products, including next-gen enterprise SSD controllers, and to high-bandwidth flash (HBF), which the outlet said is due next year; the H-TPU is reportedly already being used in 'Storage Next', Nvidia's name for the joint AIN P project with SK hynix.

Impact and signal

Affected components and suppliers

Source and time

Source: Tom's Hardware · 10/14/2026 · View original source