At the 2020 Flash Memory Summit, which for some reason is effectively being held this year, Samsung announced a new series of smart SSDs, also known as computational storage drives.

As discovered by our friends at Techradar, these are SSDs with their own processors that allow CPUs to offload work in the same way as GPUs, and are designed to help database management and virtualization in the data center, as well as video processing and (most frighteningly) AI Accelerate. According to Samsung, this will improve search speeds by a factor of 100, and also increase compression rates to pack more data onto the drive.

The technology is brought to us by Xilinx, an American semiconductor company recently acquired by AMD for $35 billion. Xilinx specializes in Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), which are used in search engine data centers, artificial neural networks, speech recognition, and high frequency stock trading.

This is the first time an FPGA has been used in a computer.

This will be an enterprise-class technology for some time, but it will inevitably spill over into the home desktop eventually. Or not. What is the point of living in a techno-dystopia?