Silicon Motion is preparing SM2504XT PCIe 5.0 SSD controller
At this year’s CES 2023, ADATA showcased the first PCIe 5.0 SSD powered by Silicon Motion. It uses Silicon Motion’s SM2508 controller, with sequential read and sequential write speeds up to 14 GB/s and 12 GB/s, respectively. Compared with the common Phison Electronics E26 solution, it is about 200 MB/s faster, and the maximum random read and write are 2M IOPS.
According to TomsHardware reports, Silicon Motion is preparing a PCIe 5.0 SSD master chip named SM2504XT, which will compete with similar products of Phison Electronics in the future. Unlike SM2508 which targets high-performance SSDs, SM2504XT mainly targets mainstream SSDs, both of which support NVMe 2.0 protocol, LDPC, E2E, and SRAM ECC.
Silicon Motion SSD Controller Roadmap (Image credit: ITHome)
SM2508 is an 8-channel controller, each channel supports a rate of 3200 MT/s, and is manufactured using TSMC’s 12nm FinFET process. SM2504XT is a 4-channel controller, 16CE, each channel supports a rate of 3600 MT/s, and is manufactured using TSMC’s more advanced 7nm process. In contrast, the E26 of Phison Electronics is an 8-channel controller, each channel supports a rate of 2400 MT/s, 32CE, and is manufactured by TSMC’s 12nm FinFET process.
Both SM2508 and SM2504XT can support the fastest NAND flash memory chip, but not every kind of NAND flash memory chip can reach the corresponding speed, and there will be different subdivision models. The SM2504XT controller will have lower power consumption and is more suitable for mobile devices such as notebook computers. It is expected that related samples will appear in September 2023.
