Realtek, known more for its cheap Ethernet PHYs and audio CODECs, entered the SSD controller market in 2017, with mainstream SSD controllers. This year, the company plans to take on giants such as Silicon Motion, Phison, Intel, and Samsung, with its own high-performance controller, the RTS5762. The PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface provides 4,000 MB/s of raw bandwidth per direction, and while it's technically impossible for any device to transfer its payload data at that speed (on account of various protocol overheads), very few PCI-Express 3.0 x4 SSDs get within 80th percentile of it (3200 MB/s per direction transfers). It's only recently that 3400 MB/s became the gold-standard of high-end M.2 NVMe SSDs, but Realtek plans to change that.

The RTS5762 is capable of up to 3,500 MB/s reads, or 87.5% saturation of the PCI-Experss 3.0 x4 bus. It supports up to 8 NAND flash channels, 3D TLC and 3D QLC NAND flash memory, and takes advantage of the newer NVMe 1.3 protocol. The only other controller right now that's capable of 3,500 MB/s reads is Samsung "Phoenix," found exclusively on the 970 Pro series (and no other brand's products). Sequential write performance is where this Realtek chip edges past Samsung, with the company showing CDM performance of up to 3,000 MB/s writes, whereas the 970 Pro is only specified to write up to 2,700 MB/s. Realtek also beefed up its mainstream NVMe controller portfolio with the new RTS5763DL. If drives based on this chip are priced right, it could carve out a new market segment between cheaper PCIe 3.0 x2 drives, and "upper mainstream" x4 drives such as the Samsung 970 EVO. Armed with just 4 NAND flash channels and no DRAM to cushion it, the RTS5763DL reads at up to 2150 MB/s, and writes at up to 1475 MB/s (as tested on CDM), making it faster than PCIe 3.0 x2 drives, at least in the sequential reads test.