Is Samsung 990 Pro PCIe 4.0 or PCIe 5.0?
A few days ago, Samsung’s next-generation 990 Pro appeared on the PCI-SIG certification list. There is no doubt that the 990 Pro will replace the 980 Pro and become Samsung’s new benchmark for consumer SSDs. According to the data, the 990 Pro has a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface and will provide two capacities of 1TB and 2TB.
In the eyes of many people, Samsung, as a leader in the SSD industry, is a matter of course that the new generation of flagship SSDs support PCIe 5.0. After all, AMD has made it clear that the upcoming AM5 platform will lead SSDs into the PCIe 5.0 era, and at the same time, it has also received strong support from the two industry giants MediaTek and Micron. However, Twitter user @KOMACHI_ENSAKA found that PCI-SIG updated the information, showing that the 990 Pro only supports PCIe 4.0.
According to TomsHardware, in the PCI-SIG database, the 990 Pro’s list of PCIe 4.0 support was added before the PCIe 5.0 list appeared, only to make things even more bizarre when the entry for PCIe 5.0 was later removed. But what is certain is that the 990 Pro does exist, and it has also appeared on the website of the National Radio Research Institute of South Korea.
It is reported that Samsung does not plan to launch PCIe 5.0 SSDs on the consumer side in 2022, and all PCIe 5.0 SSDs are currently aimed at the enterprise side. The 990 Pro itself may be a PCIe 4.0 SSD or a PCIe 5.0 SSD, and perhaps Samsung is still evaluating. It is said that Silicon Motion is currently the only manufacturer that has launched the consumer-side PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 SSD main control chip, which is positioned for enthusiast-level products. Samsung may outsource the solution of the 990 Pro PCIe 5.0 SSD.
Everything is just speculation at the moment, and Samsung may also wait for the time to come before releasing the 990 Pro SSD that supports PCIe 5.0 in a year.
