Despite the presence of several products in the PCIe 5.0 SSD market, it is still in its early stages with both controllers and flash memory requiring further advancements. Various controller manufacturers, such as Phison with its SM2508, are gearing up with significant innovations.
The Phison SM2508 has been showcased and introduced on multiple occasions. However, due to the market and product maturity levels being insufficient, it remains in the refinement phase. It is anticipated that it will be fully rolled out in the latter half of this year.
The Huirong SM2508 utilizes advanced TSMC 6nm process, reducing power consumption by 45% compared to 12nm and shrinking the area by 20% compared to 7nm.
It integrates four Arm Cortex-R8 CPU cores, supporting Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP), with 50% higher performance compared to Asymmetric Multi-Processing.
This controller supports PCIe 5.0 x4, NVMe 2.0, and can be paired with 3D TLC/QLC flash memory, with a maximum capacity of 8TB, 8 channels, and an interface speed of 3600MT/s.
With the support of this series of technologies, the theoretical sequential read/write speed of the SM2508 controller can reach 14GB/s, and the random speed can also reach 2.5 million IOPS for read and 2.4 million IOPS for write, achieving peak performance.
In terms of PCIe 4.0 controllers, Silicon Motion also has a new model, the SM2268XT2. It supports PCIe 4.0 x4 and NVMe 2.0, with flash memory supporting 3D TLC/QLC, featuring 4 channels, a maximum capacity of 4TB, and a maximum speed of 3600MT/s. Performance-wise, it's quite impressive with sequential read and write speeds reaching up to 7.4GB/s and 6.5GB/s respectively, and random read and write speeds both hitting 1.2 million IOPS.
For the enterprise market, Huirong has prepared the higher-performance SM8366, which supports various form factors such as U.2, E1.S 15/25mm, and E3.S. It not only features PCIe 5.0 x4 and NVMe 2.0 but also supports dual interfaces, OCP data center NVMe SSD 2.0, programmable NVMe/FDP/ZNS firmware, PerformaShape (dynamic performance tuning for specific applications and application-level IO isolation), NANDCommand (maximizing flash performance and reliability), and other enterprise-grade features. With 16 channels, although the interface speed is limited to 2400MT/s, its performance is robust, with sequential read/write speeds exceeding 14GB/s and random read/write speeds surpassing 3.5 million IOPS and 2.8 million IOPS respectively.
