Silicon Motion Foresees Late 2024 Debut of PCIe 5.0 SSDs in Notebooks

[T0@st]

Silicon Motion's product manager, Liu Yaoren, has predicted that the first notebook models to feature PCIe 5.0 SSD storage will hit retail around late 2024. This information was disclosed during the company's key note presentation at 2023's Flash Memory Summit Conference and Exhibition, but only picked up on by media outlets in recent days. The American-Taiwanese company showcased their SM2508 controller on the showroom floor—this is advertised as their answer to Phison's E26. The upcoming Silicon Motion-designed controller "promises to deliver sequential read and write speeds of up to 14 GB/s. Random performance is rated at 2.5 million IOPS read and 2.4 million IOPS write." NAND flash speeds of up to 3600 MT/s provide some future proofing.

ITHome has reported on further technical details released by Huirong Technology/Silicon Motion—their flagship SM2508 IC also uses the more advanced TSMC 6 nm process technology, (and) has a built-in dual-core Cortex R8 processor." The memory controller's operational TDP is rated at around 3.5 W—the firm believes that their product shows the "ultimate potential of PCIe Gen 5 performance" with ultra-low power consumption, although no thermal figures were disclosed to attendees. MSI premiered its PCIe Gen 5 SSD compatible laptop series earlier this year, but aftermarket parts with sizable heatsinks are proving to be a tricky fit.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[Chaitanya]

So now laptops will need to have additional heatpipe from main cooling assembly to provide cooling for SSDs in turn taking away headroom for either CPU or GPU.

 

[wNotyarD]

It's all laptops need: more power being wasted as heat

 

[claes]

Think the whole point of the announcement is lower power consumption. We’ll see I guess.

 

[maxfly]

We've all seen the awful heat output of gen5 m.2s. Unless they've suddenly cracked the code I doubt that's changing much if at all. The last thing I want are drives that crank out as much heat as GPUs in my already heatsoaked laptop. Can we even call them laptops anymore? Being that a boxfan is a prerequisite or your putting your tenders at serious risk. Hehe

 

[Bwaze]

I think they announced early that the next iteration of PCIe 5.0 controllers won't have the same high power draw, so this is good news for desktop drives also.

Not that it matters for average user, as far as speed goes - old PCIe 3.0 drive gets you close enough, as far as practical use goes.

 

[Tomorrow]

3,5W is for controller only. Not the whole SSD so dont expect miracles here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/2000...ies-pcie-gen5-ssds-with-35w-power-consumption

 

[GabrielLP14]

Can't wait for testing this ittle puppy but given how SMI is slow to release it, they could be called Slow Motion ROFL