Tuesday, January 4th 2022
Phison Unveils E26, the Company's First PCIe Gen5 Controller for High-end Desktop Gaming
Phison Electronics Corp., a global leader in NAND flash controller integrated circuits and storage solutions, will showcase its lineup of next-generation gaming solutions for customers, partners, media and other interested parties during CES 2022, January 5-8 exclusively by private virtual demos. The new-class of solutions include the company's first PCIe Gen5 controller for high-end desktop gaming, a future high-performance Gen4 solution, and demonstration of the next-generation game workload coming soon to PCs.
Phison, the leader in gaming-optimized SSDs pushes the boundaries of performance. The company's solutions power seamless experiences for modern console, desktop/notebook and mobile gaming, which are delivered to consumers through an extensive and diverse group of partners.
Update Jan 4th: Added presentation slides, product images and closeups of the PCB designs.
Highlighted gaming products Phison will preview on the virtual demos include:
PS5026-E26 - Phison's First PCIe Gen5 SSD Architecture
The E26 SSD solution is the best-in-class combination of performance and low-power using Phison's unique architecture. E26 is a customizable SSD platform designed for PCIe Gen5 that will span enterprise and consumer markets. The company's first Gen5 controller will ship in multiple form factors and features with the ability to scale beyond 10 GB/s while meeting power requirements for all-day computing. Phison will show the E26 for the first time at CES 2022.
PS5021-E21T - Phison's New High-Performance PCIe Gen4 DRAM-less Solution
The E21T demonstration will show Phison's new DRAM-less architecture as the future leader in next-generation mobile gaming. The E21T, the successor to the E19T, and E21T BGA, the successor to the E13T, break throughput performance barriers using the Gen4 interface to sets new standards in the user experience.
PS5013-E13T - Phison's BGA for Mobile Gaming
Xiaomi chose Phison's E13T BGA SSD and its superior performance and efficiency for the Black Shark 4 gaming phone series. Xiaomi credits the E13T BGA for delivering a 69 percent increase in read and write performance showing that NVMe redefines mobile gaming. Phison will show the Xiaomi Black Shark 4 during CES 2022 in a first-person Zoom demonstration.
Below you'll find the full presentation deck that Phison was planning to show during their in-person CES briefings.
The "Next Generation Gaming Workload" is an interesting slide. It shows a synthetic test scenario that mimics what Phison expects we'll be seeing with Microsoft's DirectStorage (they were careful to not use that name). Games are expected to stream in large amounts of data from storage, continuously, while you play the game. They tested their own controller against other major competitors and found that these exhibit some spiking over the course of a multi-hour test, which could manifest in stuttering. At this time I'm not 100% convinced, we'll see if this will actually have any effect on the gameplay experience—not much is finalized yet at this stage of development.
Phison, the leader in gaming-optimized SSDs pushes the boundaries of performance. The company's solutions power seamless experiences for modern console, desktop/notebook and mobile gaming, which are delivered to consumers through an extensive and diverse group of partners.
Highlighted gaming products Phison will preview on the virtual demos include:
PS5026-E26 - Phison's First PCIe Gen5 SSD Architecture
The E26 SSD solution is the best-in-class combination of performance and low-power using Phison's unique architecture. E26 is a customizable SSD platform designed for PCIe Gen5 that will span enterprise and consumer markets. The company's first Gen5 controller will ship in multiple form factors and features with the ability to scale beyond 10 GB/s while meeting power requirements for all-day computing. Phison will show the E26 for the first time at CES 2022.
The E21T demonstration will show Phison's new DRAM-less architecture as the future leader in next-generation mobile gaming. The E21T, the successor to the E19T, and E21T BGA, the successor to the E13T, break throughput performance barriers using the Gen4 interface to sets new standards in the user experience.
Xiaomi chose Phison's E13T BGA SSD and its superior performance and efficiency for the Black Shark 4 gaming phone series. Xiaomi credits the E13T BGA for delivering a 69 percent increase in read and write performance showing that NVMe redefines mobile gaming. Phison will show the Xiaomi Black Shark 4 during CES 2022 in a first-person Zoom demonstration.
The "Next Generation Gaming Workload" is an interesting slide. It shows a synthetic test scenario that mimics what Phison expects we'll be seeing with Microsoft's DirectStorage (they were careful to not use that name). Games are expected to stream in large amounts of data from storage, continuously, while you play the game. They tested their own controller against other major competitors and found that these exhibit some spiking over the course of a multi-hour test, which could manifest in stuttering. At this time I'm not 100% convinced, we'll see if this will actually have any effect on the gameplay experience—not much is finalized yet at this stage of development.
35 Comments on Phison Unveils E26, the Company's First PCIe Gen5 Controller for High-end Desktop Gaming
PC gaming can barely utilize pcie 3.0 ssd speeds, let alone 5.0
The media will see the demo in a few days. I think your thoughts about PC gaming and storage will change then.
You'll have to excuse me for not believing the hype...
So, any PCIe 5.0 NVMe drive might improve loading time for another second or two. Nothing significant to warranty the purchase of super expensive PCIe 5.0 NVMe drive. It's an artificial marketing push. Plus, there are no native M.2 PCIe 5.0 slots for next gen NVMe drives and no CPU supports it natively. Only very expensive Z690 motherboards have two PCIe 5.0 slots for GPUs, so theoretically GPU can go into one slot and run at x8 and PCIe 5.0 NVMe adapter could be installed into another one to run at x8 too. But this is not needed for loading games. A complete overkill for many years.
Here is a thorough review by Hardware Unboxed of general performance and loading times for games by SATA SSDs and NVMe SSDs. It says it all.
www.techspot.com/review/2116-storage-speed-game-loading/
It's simple. Those gamers who have never bought a SSD drive will hugely benefit from moving to an entry SATA SSD or entry level PCIe 3.0 NMVe SSD, for loading time. No need to spend hard earned money on massively expensive PCIe 5.0 NVMe drive.
Those who already have any SATA SSD as boot drive and storage for gaming, there is absolutely no reason to purchase a new speedy drive, as benefits will be negligible. Until games' engines are not optimised to better use PCIe SSD drives, there is no need to buy even PCIe 3.0 NVMe for loading games, let alone PCIe 5.0 NVMe drive.
yeah, i ain't holding my breath. it sorta pisses me off to buy a motherboard w/DS in mind and the extra NVE slot is still useless. :banghead:
Presumably the E26 is an eight-channel controller and we're currently limited by the bandwidth of the NAND packages themselves. Micron and Samsung hide their BGA package datasheets behind an account login - are you able to give us an idea of the current channel bandwidth of a typical consumer-level NAND package? I'm just curious how much performance PCIe Gen4 is leaving on the table at the moment....
Shiny new DirectStorage features are great but unless I misunderstand the technology it won't be retroactively applied to current games, it's something that needs to be incorporated by the developer. That means that once DirectStorage is officially released, there will be a delay for many developers to stick their neck out on an unproven new technology, and then there will be another delay until those developers release their first major game that takes advantage of DirectStorage.
Like Nvidia RTX, it will probably be 2-3 years after the launch until we see more than a handful of games with proper support. For the first year or two we'll just get a small handful of game devs adoptingt he tech as Nvidia assists/pays/cajoles them into including it to showcase the new feature. So, 3-4 years after being encouraged to buy hardware capable of DirectStorage, we'll get the first glimpse of it actually working. I don't know about you, but high-end buyers of PCIe 4.0 boards and RTX cards may well have upgraded that hardware within the 3-4 year window!
bottom line, after close to two years, there is NOTHING! that anyone should buy. the hype is bullshit (esp for gamerz). :sleep: moving on . .
RTX was announced shortly before it was released, You're confusing announcing something with launching something. Those are two very different things indeed.
All I'm saying about RTX is that for the first couple of years there weren't many games using it, and most of those that were using it were incentivised by Nvidia to do so.
the deal with hardware vendors telling *us* to wait for MS is bullshit.
E26 supports memory bus speeds up to 2400MT/s. The fastest shipping today is 1600MT/s. The increase in memory bus speed will decrease latency so you will see the performance.
One thing I want to note about what was said above. Many of the SATA vs. NVMe tests were ran on first generation NVMe drives that used the same flash (and same memory bus speeds) as the SATA products shipping at the time. That is why the results were so close together. Run a SATA SSD against something like the Kingston KC3000 or Seagate FireCuda 530 using modern flash and a high-performance E18 controller and you will be surprised at the difference.
e:
how about you but YOUR "money where your mouth is", like i did buying a different motherboard, and bring forth a MS supported direct storage to market? eh?
Real world usage with consumer workloads is 4KB QD1-4 random reads. The memory bus speed (flash to controller) has a direct impact on that in real world application performance. That said, I did explain "why - esp. in real world usage." The reason why is because the new flash increases the speed between the memory and the controller and that reduces latency.
The last one is my favorite. Phison has publicly stated we spent 30 million Dollars to bring the first PCIe Gen4 SSD to market. I would say that is putting our money where our mouth is. We haven't released a number on Gen5 development but from 2018 to 2020 we added an additional 400+ people to our R&D department (engineers).
An interesting video for the highly technical crowd.