The SiliconMotion SM2508 controller, long-awaited by drive manufacturers, is now shipping, reports BenchLife. Expected to drive the PCIe 5.0 SSD market forward, we may see Gen5 drives leveraging this technology before the year concludes.
Promising to address efficiency concerns while delivering high transfer rates characteristic of Gen5, the SM2508 is built on TSMC’s N6 process. It operates at peak efficiency of 3.5 W and consumes merely 7 W under maximum loads, a significant improvement over current Phison drives.
SiliconMotion asserts that SSDs using the SM2508 will exhibit thermal and power characteristics akin to PCIe 4.0 models, yet offer sequential speeds exceeding 14 GB/s. In some scenarios, it may even outperform Gen4 in efficiency.
Featuring eight NAND channels with 32 CE targets per channel, the SM2508 supports interface speeds up to 3,600 MT/s. It boasts impressive sequential read and write speeds up to 14.5 GB/s and 14 GB/s respectively, with random read and write performance peaking at 2.5 million IOPS. Powered by four Arm Cortex-R8 CPU cores, it also utilizes standard DRAM for lower latency workloads, a capability unmatched by its competitors.
While the SM2508 addresses many efficiency concerns, it does not resolve the limitation of benefiting from high sequential speeds only within a single drive. Data transfers between drives or other interfaces will remain capped at slower rates.
Despite this limitation, the arrival of an efficient Gen5 controller marks significant progress towards mainstream adoption of PCIe 5.0 SSDs, without the need for noisy cooling solutions commonly associated with high-performance drives.
Details regarding the availability timeline and initial partners for SM2508-based drives are yet to be confirmed. Nonetheless, this silicon innovation could be the catalyst needed to accelerate PCIe 5.0 SSD adoption across the industry.
