Phison E26 Controller Powering Several Upcoming PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSDs Detailed

[btarunr]

At the 2023 International CES, we caught a hold of Phison, makes or arguably the most popular SSD controllers, which sprung to prominence on being the first to market with PCIe Gen 4 NVMe controllers, and now hopes to repeat it with PCIe Gen 5. We'd been shown a reference-design Phison E26-powered M.2 SSD, along with some hardware specs of the controller itself. The drive itself isn't much to look at—a standard looking M.2-2280 drive with a PCI-Express 5.0 x4 host interface, and the Phison E26 controller with its shiny IHS being prominently located next to a DDR4 memory chip, and two new-generation Micron Technology 3D NAND flash memory chips.

The Phison E26 controller, bearing the long-form model number PS5026-E26, is an NVMe 2.0 spec client-segment SSD controller. It has been built on the TSMC 12 nm FinFET silicon-fabrication node. The controller features an integrated DRAM controller with support for DDR4 and LPDDR4 memory types for use as DRAM cache. Its main flash interface is 8-channel with 32 NAND chip-enable (CE) lines, support for TLC and QLC NAND flash, a dual-CPU architecture, and hardware-acceleration for AES-256, TCG-Opal, and Pyrite. The controller features Phison's 5th generation LPDC ECC and internal RAID engines. For its reference-design 2 TB TLC-based drive, Phison claims sequential transfer rates of up to 13.5 GB/s reads, with up to 12 GB/s writes. The 4K random-access performance is rated at up to 1.5 million IOPS reads, with up to 2 million IOPS writes.



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[robert3892]

The real question is availability of these from the OEMs.

 

[Chrispy_]

The term "client-segment" is doing some real heavy lifting there.

I'm trying to think of client-segment use-cases that can take advantage of PCIe 5.0 storage speeds. I guess multi-stream video editing at 8K is potentially one of them, in a scenario where a single person has all of the data locally and can afford to keep it on their workstation or Laptop rather than working with others on network storage. DirectStorage is another potential thing that could leverage it, if and when any game engines actually come to market with the technology.

Most of the use cases for storage faster than PCIe 3.0 x4 are enterprise application servers and compute clusters. I'm all for technological progress but PCIe 5.0 storage and platforms are not attractively priced or remotely mainstream yet. I guess this is the egg in the 'chicken & egg' scenario; No application developers are going to push the limits of faster storage until people have faster storage.