Marvell launched the first PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers

Marvell launched the world’s first PCI-E 5.0 SSD controller Bravera SC5, which is a product for cloud services and data centers. The massive amount of data that cloud services have to process now drives the demand for high-performance computing. As the number of cores of servers is increasing, the data throughput is also increasing. This requires faster storage bandwidth. The Bravera SC5 with PCI-E 5.0×4 can meet the thirst for the performance of cloud servers.

The Bravera SC5 series is the industry’s first PCIe 5.0×4 plus NVMe 1.4b SSD master, compared with the current PCIe 4.0 SSD master control, it can provide 2 times the performance, continuous read speed can reach 14GB/s, and random read IOPS can reach a terrible 2 million level. It is specifically optimized for cloud environments and is the first master to support Elastic SLA Enforcer, which can greatly reduce CPU utilization and improve user experience.

There are two Bravera SC5 series masters. MV-SS1331 supports 8-channel flash memory, while MV-SS1333 supports 16-channel flash memory. The performance of the latter is twice that of the existing 8-channel. The Bravera SC5 master control is also the industry’s first SSD controller that can implement SEF, ZNS, Open Channel, and other modes without changing the hardware. This provides great flexibility to seamlessly reuse the same hardware when migrating work.

From the block diagram given, the new master controller is a hybrid of ARM Cortex-R8 and Cortex-M7 architecture processors, supports DDR4-3200 or LPDDR4x-4266 ECC DRAM cache, and the package size of the master controller is 20*20mm. The continuous read speed is 14GB/s, the continuous write speed is 9GB/s, 4K random read IOPS is 2 million, 4K random write IOPS is 1 million, although the performance is very strong, the power consumption is also relatively high, respectively 9W And 9.8W.

Bravera SC5 supports Marvell’s fifth-generation NANDEdge LDPC error correction technology, and supports 3D NAND from various flash memory manufacturers, from SLC to QLC. At present, Marvell has begun to provide customers with samples.