Phison shows the enormous performance of PCIe Gen5 SSDs
PCIe Gen5 SSDs will hit the market in the coming months to break all performance records in consumer customer storage. They will harness the power of the industry’s most advanced interface, PCI-Express 5.0, and feature the latest generation of NAND flash memory.
Another component of interest will be its controller, which is key to realizing the full potential of solid-state drives. Phison is, together with Silicon Motion, the world’s largest producer of NAND flash controllers and sells it to a good number of manufacturers beyond the giants in the sector, Samsung or WD, which use their own controllers.
PCIe Gen5 SSD, Spectacular Performance
Phison has developed the E26 controller specifically for this type of storage solution. They are intended to accelerate workloads on next-generation NVMe SSDs, including direct access technologies based on Microsoft’s DirectStorage API. They will feature two ARM Cortex-R5 cores and three proprietary CoXProcessor 2.0 accelerators integrated on a chip using TSMC’s 12nm manufacturing processes.
The company has demonstrated the enormous performance of this platform with an engineering sample compatible with Intel and AMD architectures. For the demo, Phison used Micron’s 3D TCL NAND flash memory and an ASUS X670 Crosshair Hero motherboard.
Intel is expected to support these PCIe Gen5 SSDs (with full performance) with the “Raptor Lake” platform, the 13th generation Core. As for AMD, it has confirmed full support with the new Ryzen 7000 processors, socket AM5, and 600 series chipsets unveiled last week at Computex 2022.
The level of performance can be seen in the following screenshot of a test carried out with the CrystalDiskMark benchmark, where sequential read/write speeds of more than 12/10Gbytes per second. In random performance, the drive can provide up to 1.31 million 4K read IOPS.
These are the highest values ever achieved by a consumer SSD, up to 70% higher than the current ones that use PCIe 4.0. It must be said that this development is an engineering sample and not a final product, which according to other providers will achieve even higher performance: 13/12 Gbytes per second in reads/writes.
Phison’s E26 controller will be able to be used in both consumer and business units. The company has used an M.2 2580 form factor for the test SSD, but the final drives are expected to ship in the more standardized M.2 2280.
