In context: Up till now, the one PCIe 5.0 SSDs available on the market have been powered by the Phison E26 controller. They’re actually quick, with sequential speeds of over 12GB/s, however additionally they run extremely sizzling and are power-hungry. We’re speaking lively cooling necessities and over 11W of energy draw below load, which isn’t precisely perfect for rigs.
Now, the long-awaited SiliconMotion SM2508 controller is transport to drive producers, based on BenchLife, and it may very well be the important thing to cracking open the PCIe 5.0 SSD market. We may see Gen5 drives primarily based on it earlier than the top of the yr.
This controller may lastly repair these effectivity woes whereas nonetheless bringing the blistering switch charges Gen5 is understood for. It is fabricated on TSMC’s N6 course of, permitting it to function at 3.5 W at peak, whereas drives primarily based on it sip 7 W below most masses – an evening and day distinction in comparison with the present Phison drives.
SiliconMotion additionally claims SSDs utilizing the SM2508 can have related thermal and energy traits as at the moment’s PCIe 4.0 fashions, but nonetheless characteristic the 14 GB/s+ sequential speeds of Gen5. In some instances, it may even be extra environment friendly than Gen4.
The chip has eight NAND channels with 32 CE targets per channel, supporting interface speeds as much as 3,600 MT/s. It will probably obtain sequential learn and write speeds of as much as 14.5 GB/s and 14 GB/s, respectively, together with random learn and write efficiency reaching 2.5 million IOPS.
As for processing, 4 Arm Cortex-R8 CPU cores get the job completed. The chip additionally has a intelligent trick the place it makes use of normal DRAM as a substitute of NAND flash for decrease latency workloads – one thing rival controllers cannot do.
Now there’s one niggling problem with PCIe 5.0 SSDs that this controller cannot repair. You are principally restricted to benefitting from these blistering sequential speeds on that single drive, as shuffling knowledge between drives or over different interfaces can be capped at a lot slower charges.
Nevertheless, having an environment friendly Gen5 controller that does not require a tiny screaming fan simply to remain alive remains to be a step in the best route for making these cutting-edge SSDs.
There is not any agency timeline on once we’ll see SM2508-based drives hit the market or who the preliminary companions can be. However this silicon may very well be the spark that lastly ignites PCIe 5.0 SSD adoption within the mainstream.