Later this year, enthusiast-grade PCs will have solid-state SSDs with PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. Fortunately for enthusiasts, Silicon Motion, a major developer of SSD controllers, says they will unlock important functionality of Intel's 12th Gen Core 'Alder Lake' and AMD's 7th Gen Ryzen 'Raphael' processors.
However, the business expects significant PC OEMs will not utilize PCIe Gen5 drives until 2024. Silicon Motion and its partners plan to release enthusiast-grade SSDs using the SM2508 controller by year's end. These drives will have a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface and give roughly 13 GB/s of throughput to conforming desktop PCs. These new SM2508-based PCIe Gen5 SSDs will compete with InnoGrit's IG5666 controller and Phison's PS5026-E26 controller-based SSDs. Upon release, these drives will undoubtedly be among the best SSDs. But we don't know which controller will be the first to market or provide the best performance. Three SSDs with PCIe 5.0 x4 interface will be available in 2022, allowing enthusiasts to finally take advantage of one of Intel's Alder Lake processor's core capabilities.
Because OEMs don't prefer to adopt pricey leading-edge SSD architectures, customers of standard PCs from significant brands will have to stick with PCIe 4.0 x4 SSDs in 2022-2023. As a result of low-cost DRAM-less SSDs with a PCIe 4.0 interface, mainstream PCs will exclusively embrace PCIe Gen4 drives this year.
"PCIe Gen4 is expected to endure a few years," stated Silicon Motion CEO Wallace Kou during last week's earnings call (via SeekingAlpha). "We're also preparing to debut our third-generation PCIe Gen4 controller next year, followed by PCIe Gen5 the year after." Silicon Motion is now developing the SM2507 controller with PCIe 5.0 interface for mainstream PCs and notebooks (which outsell desktops 7 to 1 these days). SMI intends to commercialize this platform in 2024.
Silicon Motion wants to offer its SM8366 platform for enterprise-grade SSDs with a PCIe Gen 5 interface before making PCIe Gen5 SSDs available to ordinary consumer PCs. After sampling the SM8366 controller with partners late last year, SMI intends to ship genuine products based on this chip in 2023. A 3rd generation enterprise-grade SSD controller, the SM8366 will incorporate all the business has learnt about such drives thus far. SMI does not specify the SM8366's features, but it is aimed for both hyperscale and enterprise customers, so anticipate it to be powerful and configurable. In the second half of the year, Kou expects to start sampling the SM8366 PCIe Gen5 SSD controller. In addition to future design desired by hyperscale and enterprise customers, such as highly customizable firmware, performance shaping capability, and optimum data placement technologies, we believe our PCIe Gen5 is ideally positioned.
Silicon Motion: PCIe 5.0 SSDs for Enthusiasts on Track for 2022
