{
  "id": 3515008,
  "title": "Hot Chips 2026: High Bandwidth Flash promises massive bandwidth and capacity, but its usability is extremely limited — new memory format strikes a balance between HBM and NAND flash",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/26/hot-chips-2026-high-bandwidth-flash-promises-massive-bandwidth-and",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-08-26T13:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Tom's Hardware",
    "slug": "tom-s-hardware",
    "url": "https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/hot-chips-2026-high-bandwidth-flash-promises-massive-bandwidth-and-capacity-but-its-usability-is-extremely-limited-new-memory-format-strikes-a-balance-between-hbm-and-nand-flash"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "At Hot Chips 2026, OXMIQ Labs announced High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) as a high-capacity memory technology. While HBF cannot replace High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for most workloads, it could serve as a specialized memory tier for large, but relatively inactive datasets. OXMIQ stated that HBF offers eight to sixteen times more capacity than HBM at a comparable cost. However, the main advantage of HBF lies in its capacity, not in its performance. HBF's performance is a secondary consideration, with the technology supporting read block sizes between 64 bytes and 4 kilobytes, 4KB writes, and 4KB page sizes. When bandwidth becomes the limiting factor, HBF's lower bandwidth becomes a bottleneck, making HBM a more cost-effective choice for maximum inference throughput from a fully utilized rack. HBF can reduce the number of GPUs required for very large models, such as OXMIQ's Kimi-K3 model with 1.56 TB of weights, of which 93% consists of MoE expert weights. Keeping these experts in HBF and frequently accessed weights in HBM could minimize expert transfers, reduce all-to-all communication, and potentially decrease network traffic. HBF could also store large KV caches for sparse-attention models, fetching only the necessary data from HBF to HBM during each decoding step.",
  "summary": "OXMIQ presented its High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) use-case scenarios at Hot Chips 2026, which dramatically narrow the circumstances under which HBF makes sense.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}