SK hynix and Sandisk have teamed up for the global standardization of high-bandwidth flash (HBF), which is viewed as a new breakthrough for advancing artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators. SK hynix said Thursday it hosted a kick-off event for the HBF Spec Standardization Consortium at flash memory giant Sandisk’s headquarters in Milpitas, California. The two sides will set up a dedicated team to work on HBF standardization under the Open Compute Project, the world’s largest organization for sharing data center product designs and industry practices. “Together with Sandisk, we will establish HBF as an industry standard and build a foundation for the entire AI ecosystem to grow together,” SK hynix said. HBF is a next-generation flash memory chip architecture for high-performance storage that will be critical for AI inference. Memory, mostly DRAM chips such as high-bandwidth memory (HBM), serves as a fast, temporary and volatile workspace for active data and applications. Storage, largely based on NAND flash memory including solid-state drives (SSDs), functions as a non-volatile