Silicon Motion Launches Power Efficient PCIe Gen 5 SSD Controller

[Nomad76]

Silicon Motion Technology Corporation, a global leader in designing and marketing NAND flash controllers for solid-state storage devices, today announced SM2508, the best power efficiency PCIe Gen 5 NVMe 2.0 client SSD controller for AI PCs and gaming consoles. It's the world's first PCIe Gen 5 client SSD controller using TSMC's 6 nm EUV process, offering a 50% reduction in power consumption compared to competitive offerings in the 12 nm process. With less than 7 W power consumption for the entire SSD, it delivers 1.7x better power efficiency than PCIe Gen 4 SSDs and up to 70% better than current competitive PCIe Gen 5 offerings on the market. Silicon Motion will be showcasing its SM2508 based SSD design and other innovations during the Future of Memory and Storage event from Aug. 6 to 8 at booth #315:

Silicon Motion's SM2508 is a superior-performance, low-power PCIe Gen 5 x4 NVMe 2.0 SSD controller designed for AI-capable PC notebooks. It supports eight NAND channels with up to 3,600 MT/s per channel, delivering sequential performance speeds of up to 14.5 GB/s and 13.6 GB/s and random performance speeds of up to 2.5M IOPS, providing up to 2x higher performance than PCIe Gen 4 products. The SM2508 maximizes PCIe Gen 5 performance with an impressive power consumption of approximately 3 W. It features Silicon Motion's proprietary 8th-generation NANDXtend technology, which includes an on-disk training algorithm designed to reduce ECC timing. This enhancement boosts performance and maximizes power efficiency while ensuring compatibility with the latest 3D TLC/QLC NAND technologies, enabling higher data density and meeting the evolving demands of next-generation AI PCs.

"SSD storage solutions are continuously evolving to meet the new challenges posed by future AI applications, which demand data efficiency and high-performance models," said Nelson Duann, Silicon Motion's Senior VP of Client & Automotive Storage Business. "Our PCIe Gen 5 SSD controller, with its best-in-class power efficiency, is designed to satisfy the unique demands of today's AI-capable PCs, delivering high performance and power efficiency to meet the evolving AI PC standards of tomorrow."

The SM2508 specifications include:

• 
  PCIe Gen 5 x4, NVMe 2.0
• 8 NAND flash channels, up to 3600MT/s
• TSMC's 6 nm process
• Powerful quad-core Arm Cortex -R8 CPU supporting four PCIe lanes of 32 Gb/s data transfer speed
• Up to 14.5 GB/s and 13.6 GB/s sequential performance and up to 2.5M IOPS random performance
• Support the latest 3D TLC/QLC NAND

The SM2508 is being designed by multiple major SSD vendors including major NAND vendors. Production ramp of SM2508 is targeted for Q4 of this year.

Besides the SM2508, the Silicon Motion exhibit will also include:

MonTitan PCIe Gen 5 Enterprise SSD Development Platform for AI Storage Workloads

• SM8366: 14 GB/s sequential and 3.5 M IOPS random SSD performance, supporting capacities beyond 128 TB with 16 channels providing up to 2400MT/s of TLC and QLC NAND.
• MonTitan: Multi-Dimensional QLC-based PCIe Gen 5 SSDs: Enabled by FDP and PerformaShape technologies to maximize AI Training Pipeline performance.

UFS 4.0 and USB Storage Solutions for AI PCs and AI Smartphones

• SM2756 UFS 4.0 controller: 65% more power-efficient than previous-generation UFS 3.1.
• SM2322 USB SSD controller: Double up the capacity of the previous-generation for portable SSDs

Advanced Storage Solutions for AI in Automotive / IoT Edge Applications

• SM2264XT-AT Automotive-grade SSD Controller: 30% less CPU power-consuming than PCIe Gen 4 SSD without SR-IOV.
• FerriSSD PCIe Gen 4 NVMe single-chip BGA SSD
• Ferri-eMMC 5.0/5.1
• Ferri-UFS 2.2/3.1

Silicon Motion representatives will also be presenting at FMS forums. For further information, please visit: https://www.siliconmotion.com/events/2024FMS/

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[Nanochip]

6nm is yielding excellent power savings which should in turn yield much lower temps. If so, Maybe soon pcie5.0 drives will become mainstream.
But my question is when will Samsung and Western Digital release pcie5.0 designs?

 

[Metroid]

So no more stupid heatsinks?

 

[evernessince]

6nm is yielding excellent power savings which should in turn yield much lower temps. If so, Maybe soon pcie5.0 drives will become mainstream.
But my question is when will Samsung and Western Digital release pcie5.0 designs?

Pricing and lack of meaningful difference for most use cases will likely slow adoption.

A 2TB PCIe 5.0 drive is still some $70 more expensive than a 4.0 drive and I'd except a product using this 6nm NAND to increase that margin a bit more.

Most customers won't see any benefit from going PCIe 5.0. Margin of error difference in games and common apps.

 

[bonehead123]

when will Samsung and Western Digital release pcie5.0 designs

Seeings how they are selling the crap out of some of the fastest Gen 4 drives on the market, I'm certain they are taking their time designing & perfecting their own Gen 5 controllers, so when they do release them, they will easily be able to keep their respective market positions, and start selling boatloads of them too...but when that will be is anyone's guess...

Perhaps the release of this SM controller will push WD/Sammy to proceed asap

 

[phints]

SM2508 sounds very impressive, should bring temps down too hope it manages to deliver Random/QD1-4 speeds as well. Here is to hoping Samsung and WD are indeed close on sequels to their now venerable 990P and SN850X drives.

 

[LittleBro]

Those are some great news. Finally some improvement after those 12-15 Watts.
I don't care about seq speeds. While maintining <=7W TDP, make that controller do at least 150 MB/s Q1D1 R/W and take my money.

Things like these should be eliminated forever:

 

[RogueSix]

Here is to hoping Samsung and WD are indeed close on sequels to their now venerable 990P and SN850X drives.

990 Pro is hardly "venerable". They had a firmware fiasco in early 2023 that resulted in degradation of millions of drives. Some people are now stuck with SSDs with very low "health" ratings. I was relatively "lucky" as mine only degraded to 93% (a brand new drive) but others weren't.

Samsung also handled it very poorly. Given the scope of the issue, the firmware fix took ages. There was zero communication and when they finally released the fix, they never addressed the root cause or if the drives really suffered irreversible damage.
Well, actually their silence speaks louder than words. Of course, the damage is/was irreversible or otherwise why would they not alleviate customer concerns about their degraded drives?

The most popular theory from tech-savvy folks is: Samsung's botched firmware shredded the NAND on the drives due to buggy write amplification.

It is kind of unfathomable that Samsung screwed up this badly AGAIN after they already had several firmware fiascos with the 980 Pro (including bricked drives).

So, I'm very happy to hear about this SM controller and hope it finds widespread adoption. Phison surely are not sleeping so I'm sure they will have a 6nm part soon as well. The more alternatives to crap like Samsung, the better. I would really love a new blazing fast Gen 5 Crucial T800 (would almost buy for product name alone ) with a more efficient (cooler) SM or Phison controller.

 

[A&P211]

Pricing and lack of meaningful difference for most use cases will likely slow adoption.

A 2TB PCIe 5.0 drive is still some $70 more expensive than a 4.0 drive and I'd except a product using this 6nm NAND to increase that margin a bit more.

Most customers won't see any benefit from going PCIe 5.0. Margin of error difference in games and common apps.

It will only drop the price to 69.99 more expensive

990 Pro is hardly "venerable". They had a firmware fiasco in early 2023 that resulted in degradation of millions of drives. Some people are now stuck with SSDs with very low "health" ratings. I was relatively "lucky" as mine only degraded to 93% (a brand new drive) but others weren't.

Samsung also handled it very poorly. Given the scope of the issue, the firmware fix took ages. There was zero communication and when they finally released the fix, they never addressed the root cause or if the drives really suffered irreversible damage.
Well, actually their silence speaks louder than words. Of course, the damage is/was irreversible or otherwise why would they not alleviate customer concerns about their degraded drives?

The most popular theory from tech-savvy folks is: Samsung's botched firmware shredded the NAND on the drives due to buggy write amplification.

It is kind of unfathomable that Samsung screwed up this badly AGAIN after they already had several firmware fiascos with the 980 Pro (including bricked drives).

So, I'm very happy to hear about this SM controller and hope it finds widespread adoption. Phison surely are not sleeping so I'm sure they will have a 6nm part soon as well. The more alternatives to crap like Samsung, the better. I would really love a new blazing fast Gen 5 Crucial T800 (would almost buy for product name alone ) with a more efficient (cooler) SM or Phison controller.

I'll never get a Samsung drive again. My son had a 980, it went from 99% to 90% within 2 months with light writing.

 

[chrcoluk]

A step in the right direction on the node shrink, but I dont feel excited about an SSD with no moving parts having a 7 watts TDP.

 

[Minus Infinity]

So no more stupid heatsinks?

Maybe no more stupidly large heatsinks. Hopefully, at worst we can get away with a smaller unit like for PCI-E 4.0

 

[Nanochip]

Pricing and lack of meaningful difference for most use cases will likely slow adoption.

A 2TB PCIe 5.0 drive is still some $70 more expensive than a 4.0 drive and I'd except a product using this 6nm NAND to increase that margin a bit more.

Most customers won't see any benefit from going PCIe 5.0. Margin of error difference in games and common apps.

I use wd black sn850x in everything even with my ps5 and Macintosh and pc. Solid solid pcie4.0 performer.