According to TrendForce research, material supply improvement and spiking demand for enterprise SSDs from North American hyperscale data center and enterprise clients in 2Q22 coupled with the Kioxia contamination incident in 1Q22 prompted customers to ramp up procurement to avoid future supply shortages. Manufacturers also give priority to meeting the needs of server customers due to the high pricing of enterprise SSD. In the second quarter, overall revenue of the enterprise SSD market increased by 31.3% to US$7.32 billion.

As the market leader, Samsung has grown its enterprise SSD revenue to US$3.26 billion with the recovery of enterprise SSD procurement. Especially in the second quarter, when orders for other consumer products continued to decline, enterprise SSD became the company's outlet for reducing production capacity. At present, Samsung has been continuously investing in the development of next-generation transmission specification products such as the CXL 2.0 product released at the Flash Summit in early August, in order to maintain a leading position in the market.

Corsair decided it was time to start teasing its upcoming MP700 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD, although the company didn't bother providing any images of the drive itself, or any specifications in the teaser. However, Corsair did provide some sequential performance figures, which end up being impressive and disappointing at the same time. The MP700 is said to offer sequential read speeds of up to 10 GB/s or 10,000 MB/s if you prefer and sequential write speeds of 9.5 GB/s. These are obviously very fast speeds, but quite far from what the PCIe 5.0 can deliver and the performance figures are only a bit faster than the best PCIe 4.0 drives. It's likely that we'll see better performance from second generation controllers, just as we did with PCIe 4.0 SSDs, as this gives both the SSD controller makers and the SSD makers a chance to refresh their products a year or two down the line.

The upcoming Samsung 990 PRO flagship consumer SSD has recently been listed as PCIe 5.0 compliant by PCI-SIG with the entry also confirming the drive's name and M.2 interface. The upgrade to PCIe 5.0 from 4.0 doubles the available bandwidth for the card with Samsung's existing enterprise PCIe 5.0 drives reaching speeds of 13,000 MB/s significantly above the 7000 MB/s of the best PCIe 4.0 drives. The latest Intel Alder Lake systems can support PCIe 5.0 drives on select motherboards with AMD support set to arrive with the launch of Ryzen 7000 and X670/B650 motherboards. Samsung is expected to release at least 1 TB and 2 TB variants of the drive however other details such as the exact length of the card and the controller used are currently unknown.

MSI welcomes the MEG Ai1300P PCIE5 power supply unit, the world's first power supply unit to be fully ready for ATX 3.0 and PCIe 5.0. With graphics cards becoming all the more important, users must know what components to buy for their system if they are looking to upgrade. To understand why the MEG Ai1300P PCIE5 is the ultimate future-proof power supply unit, let's begin with understanding ATX 3.0.

ATX 3.0 is Intel's new specification standard for existing PSUs. In short, ATX 3.0's main purpose is to help provide more reliability, and better power efficiency and provide graphics cards up to 600 watts of power. ATX 3.0 is created in response to graphics cards' increase in performance and the ever-increasing need for power. ATX 3.0 puts heavy emphasis on power excursions to make sure high-performance graphics cards can be sustained and your system can remain stable. Thanks to ATX 3.0 there is now an increase in efficiency while idling and a new power connector is added to help achieve all the above. ATX 3.0 added a new PCIe 5.0 12VHPWR connector that features 12+4 pins instead of the traditional 6 or 8. With the new PCIe 5.0 connector, the power supply and cable can supply up to 600 watts of power.

During this year's Flash Memory Summit, Phison, a company known for SSD controllers and now flash drives, demonstrated a system running AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors based on Zen 4 architecture. What is interesting about the shown specification is that the system was running an engineering sample of an upcoming Zen 4-based CPU with the latest storage technologies at impressive speeds. Using a Phison PS5026-E26 SSD controller, also called E26, the PCIe 5.0 SSD is powered by Micron's latest 232-layer TLC NAND flash. This new NAND technology will also bring greater densities to the market by promising higher endurance, higher read/write speeds, and better efficiency.

With AMD's upcoming AM5 platform, support for PCIe 5.0 SSDs is a welcome addition. And we today have some preliminary tests that show just how fast these SSDs can run. In CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4, it achieved over 10 GB/s in both read and write. We know that the E26 controller is capable of 12 GB/s speeds, so more fine-tuning is needed. Being an early sample, we expect final specifications to be better. The system is powered by an engineering sample of a six-core, twelve-threaded Zen 4 CPU running at unknown clocks, codenamed 100-000000593-20_Y. We can expect to see more of this technology once AMD's AM5 platform lands and Phison-powered SSDs hit the shelves in September.

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CDNS) today announced that its PHY and Controller IP for the PCI Express (PCIe ) 5.0 specification in the TSMC N7, N6 and N5 process technologies have passed certification tests from PCI-SIG at the industry's first event for PCIe 5.0 specification compliance held in April. The Cadence solutions were tested to their full potential and complied with the full speed of 32GT/s for PCIe 5.0 technology. The compliance program provides designers with testing procedures to assess that the PCIe 5.0 interfaces on their system-on-chip (SoC) designs will operate as expected.

The Cadence IP for PCIe 5.0 technology consists of a PHY, companion controller and Verification IP (VIP) targeted at SoC designs for very high-bandwidth hyperscale computing, networking and storage applications. With Cadence's PHY and Controller Subsystem for PCIe 5.0 architecture, customers can design extremely power-efficient SoCs while accelerating time to market.

Intel is preparing to launch its 13th generation of desktop processors codenamed Raptor Lake. Succeeding Alder Lake, the 13th gen design will implement up to eight P-cores with 16 E-cores manufactured on Intel's improved 7+ technology node. Today, we got a performance preview from SiSoftware that has collected SiSoftware Sandra database scores of Intel Core i9-13900 Raptor Lake-S processor. They present an overview of a few benchmarks. Firstly, the SoC features 36 MB of unified L3 cache versus 30 MB in Alder Lake. With DDR5 memory running up to 5600 MT/s and PCIe 5.0, the SoC features the latest IO and memory standards. The big P-cores now lack AVX-512 and feature 2 MB of L2 cache per core. We see 4 MB of L2 cache for a cluster of small E-cores. An exciting addition to E-cores is the AVX/AVX2 support, which is a first for Atom cores.

Regarding testing, the author has collected a few tests that seemed appropriate to compare to the equivalent Alder Lake model. Starting with ALU/FPU tests that benchmark basic arithmetic tasks, Raptor Lake delivered 33% to 50% improvement over Alder Lake. The Raptor Lake design achieved this with 3.7 GHz P-Core and 2.76 GHz E-Core frequency. In vectorized and SIMD tests, the 13th gen design showed only 5% to 8% improvement over the previous generation. For more benchmarks and accurate results, we have to wait for TechPowerUp's test, which will be coming on the release day.

According to TrendForce research, North American data centers saw an improvement in components supply after February, driving a recovery in purchase order volume. As Server brands returned to normal in-office work following the pandemic, the increase in capital expenditures on related information equipment has also boosted order growth. The addition of Kioxia's raw material contamination incident led to an increase in the pricing of certain rush orders, pushing up overall Enterprise SSD revenue in 1Q22 to US$5.58 billion, or 14.1% growth QoQ.

According to TrendForce, Samsung and SK hynix (including Solidigm) were the top two players in 1Q22. At the beginning of the year, demand from hyperscale data centers resulted in high inventory levels due to component mismatches, leading Samsung's order growth missing expectations. However, as repercussions from the WDC and Kioxia contamination incident hit NAND Flash production capacity in 1Q22, server customers quickly turned to Samsung for additional orders, driving the company's 1Q22 revenue to US$2.77 billion, up 14.8% QoQ.

Biostar is seemingly trying to become more competitive in the consumer motherboard market and although the company has some catching up to do with the tier one motherboard brands, the company has put out some more interesting products in the past couple of years. Its VX670E Valkyrie motherboard seems to sit near the middle of the X670E models that have been announced so far, although it's a little bit hard to tell, as the company only provided partial specs. As this is an AMD X670E based board, the PCIe x16 slot is using PCIe 5.0, although it's multiplexed with the second x16 slot, which means if both slots are used, the bandwidth drops down to eight lanes per slot. The board layout doesn't suggest any PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots, but as this is mandatory on X670E board, we have to presume that the M.2 slot right below the x16 PCIe slot, is the PCIe 5.0 one. The board has a further three M.2 slots, as well as what appears to be an empty M.2 E-keyed slot for a WiFi/Bluetooth module.

Other features listed by Biostar includes 2.5 Gbps Ethernet via a Realtek chip, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, six SATA 3 ports, one rear and one front header for USB Type-C Gen 3.2 2x2 (20 Gbps) ports, as well as Realtek based audio and a pair of ARGB headers. The board also has a debug LED and a few buttons and switches for resetting the CMOS, and powering the board on. Interestingly, Biostar also provided figures for the memory clock speed, as the company listed support for up to four sticks of DDR5 memory at 5600 MHz plus. AMD has already demoed higher memory clocks of 6000 and even 6400 MHz during its keynote, as supported by the footnotes that went alongside it, suggesting that this might just be a placeholder. Intel officially only supports 4800 MHz DDR5 memory, but speeds in excess of 6000 MHz doesn't appear to be an issue with the right motherboard and CPU combination. We'll have to wait and see what the official figures will be from AMD.

NVMe SSDs based on the M.2 form factor come in several different lengths today, ranging from 30 to 110 mm, although the 30 mm drives are rare and the 110 mm drives have so far been reserved for the server space. However, they've all had one thing in common, the 22 mm width, as otherwise there might be issues in terms of fitting the drives, especially in notebooks. However, it appears that the PCI-SIG snuck in a wider, 25 mm option for M.2 SDDs at the end of 2020, but seemingly forgot to mention it to anyone. The only reason we even noticed, was because Gigabyte listed its upcoming X670 and X670E motherboards as having support for 25110 SSD's, where you'd expect to see support for 2280 or 22110 drives.

An extra 3 mm in width might not sound like much, but many M.2 drives seem to be somewhat space constrained, mainly with regards to the passive components and the power regulation. It also seems like this is in preparation for PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives, where the host controller is expected to run hotter, even though it might not be as bad as initially expected. Regardless, it seems like motherboard makers are now making space for this slightly wider M.2 form factor, as well as implementing suitable cooling solutions to match. Whether we'll see drives using this slightly wider form factor or not, is still up in the air and one reason why the SSD manufacturers might choose not to go wider, is because new drives might not fit in older motherboards and laptops, if the clearance is too small.

Although AMD didn't provide too many details during its Computex 2022 keynote speech about the upcoming AM5 platform, the company did announce that there will be at least three chipsets for the platform and showed pictures of some upcoming motherboards. ASUS has kindly filled in some more details about its upcoming ROG Crosshair X670E Extreme, which will be one of its higher-end models. Sadly the pictures posted are kind of tiny and the company didn't provide a shot of the rear I/O. That said, ASUS did point out some of its new features that we can expect to find on the ROG Crosshair X670E Extreme.

For starters, the board will have a pair of PCIe 5.0 x16 slots, although each slot is likely to only have eight lanes each, when both slots are in use, but ASUS doesn't mention any details here. The board has support for up to five M.2 NVMe SSDs, four of which support PCIe 5.0. Only two are onboard, with the other three being via ASUS' proprietary ROG PCIe 5.0 M.2 card and ROG GEN-Z.2 card. ASUS also promises USB4 support, as well as a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 header with Quick Charge 4+ as well as up to 60 W charging support, for cases with a front USB-C port. On top of the rear I/O is an AniMe Matrix LED display that can be user customised.

AMD has confirmed its revamped APU strategy will be delivered throughout three different APU line-ups come 2023. While Raphael will take care of AMD's hopes in the desktop space, the company is readying a new, "Dragon Range" lineup of "pinnacle gaming"-oriented APUs, leveraging the company's upcoming Zen 4 architecture, DDR5, and PCIe 5. Dragon Range APUs will feature the "highest core, thread, and cache ever for a mobile gaming CPU" - although AMD stopped just short of confirming exactly what "highest" translates to. To aid in its extreme gaming aspirations, TDP for Dragon Range is set at 55 W - they thus "largely exist in the space where gaming laptops are plugged in the majority of the time," according to AMD director of technical marketing Robert Hallock.

Another APU family, Phoenix, will be aimed at thin and lights with a penchant for gaming. Phoenix too will leverage AMD's Zen 4 core, DDR5 memory subsystem, and PCIe 5 interfaces. Being aimed at thin and lights, Phoenix APUs are set for a 35 W - 45 W operating range. Interestingly, AMD didn't share any other details - more crucially, the graphics architecture that's to be employed in these high-performance APUs.