What with overheating points and the truth that uncooked bandwidth solely will get you to date, suffice to say that the newest era of PCIe Gen 5 SSDs have not precisely blown our socks off. So what to make of reports that SSD controller specialist SiliconMotion is already deep into improvement with its Gen 6 know-how?
In a publish on China Flash Market (through Tom’s Hardware) SiliconMotion head honcho Wallace C. Kou revealed that the corporate’s first PCIe Gen 6 controller chip, dubbed SM8466, is “within the improvement stage.”
Kou did not present any specs, although he did say that the chip was being fabricated on 4 nm silicon. That’s probably TSMC N4 and a transparent advance over the N6 node utilized by SiliconMotion’s present most superior controllers.
That’s important as a result of one of many defining options of the preliminary crop of PCIe Gen 5 SSDs was extra energy consumption and overheating, arguably partly resulting from utilizing an outdated silicon node.
Admittedly, that was the Phison E26 chip constructed on aged 12 nm silicon. SiliconMotion’s personal Gen 5 controller, the SM2508 was truly delayed to allow a soar to the 6nm node and hopefully sidestep these points.
Thus, it stands to purpose that if 6 nm is required to gen Gen 5 working properly, 4 nm can be a good suggestion for the much more demanding Gen 6 protocol.
Speaking of which, PCIe Gen 6 theoretically doubles bandwidth from Gen 5. That means a peak bandwidth for a quad-lane drive of 32 GB/s, up from 16 GB/s for Gen 5.
Of course, in observe there are numerous limitations. For starters there are protocol overheads that restrict the efficient knowledge fee. Then there are {hardware} limitations within the type of the NAND and controller chips and even with broader sign integrity.
That SiliconMotion SM2508 controller, as an illustration, peaks at 14.5 GB/s and 14 GB/s sequential learn and write, not the total 16 GB/s. Safe to say, then, that the brand new SM8466 will not hit 32 GB/s.
More to the purpose, it is not possible that there shall be any NAND flash chips that may allow something like the total 32 GB/s when the primary Gen 6 drives arrive. The different subject is that peak bandwidth is not the entire story.
Latency and 4K random entry is essential, too. The SM2508 is rated at 2.5M IOPS in each instructions and will probably be very fascinating to see how a lot of an advance the brand new Gen 6 chip is.
Ultimately, latency is not one thing that NAND flash know-how does terribly effectively, particularly in comparison with, say, RAM. Intel’s 3D XPoint, in any other case often known as Optane, was a lot better in that regard however didn’t take off and has now been canned.
All of which implies that we’re not essentially tremendous excited in regards to the prospect of Gen 6 drives. They’ll be sooner by way of peak bandwidth, for certain. But will they make our PCs really feel sooner or our video games load faster? All that’s way more uncertain.
Anywho, given the brand new Gen 6 controller remains to be in improvement and we have but to truly get our fingers on an SSD with SiliconMotion’s Gen 5 chip, honest say it will be some time but earlier than we get wherever close to with the ability to purchase a Gen 6 drive powered by SiliconMotion.
