tech news Silicon Motion: PCIe 5.0 SSD Controller to Debut Next Year

[Lightwreather]

Summary

Silicon Motion said this week that it would start sampling its enterprise-grade SSD controllers with a PCIe Gen 5.0 interface in the second half of next year, which means that they will debut commercially in 2022. This is one of the first times that an SSD controller maker has mentioned a chip with a PCIe 5.0 interface, and even though the controller will debut in the server space, models for consumers will inevitably follow.   

 

Quotes

Quote

Silicon Motion said this week that it would start sampling its enterprise-grade SSD controllers with a PCIe Gen 5.0 interface in the second half of next year, which means that they will debut commercially in 2022. This is one of the first times that an SSD controller maker has mentioned a chip with a PCIe 5.0 interface, and even though the controller will debut in the server space, models for consumers will inevitably follow.   

The PCIe 5.0 interface will increase data transfer speeds to 32 GT/s per lane, which will increase the total bandwidth provided by a PCIe x16 slot to ~64 GB/s, whereas a PCIe x4 slot can transfer up to ~16 GB/s.

Increased transfer rates will be particularly beneficial for various bandwidth-hungry applications, like servers, high-end storage subsystems, and accelerators. Using the PCIe Gen 5 physical layer, various next-gen platforms will also support CXL and Gen-Z protocols designed specifically to connect CPUs with various accelerators and maintain memory and cache coherency at low latencies. 

The first platforms to support a PCIe 5.0 interface are Intel's 12th-Gen Alder Lake CPUs for client PCs, which are expected to debut in the second half of 2021, as well as the company's 4th Generation Xeon Scalable 'Sapphire Rapids' for data centers and supercomputers that is projected to launch in early 2022. In addition to PCIe 5.0, Sapphire Rapids will also support the CXL 1.1 protocol. 

So far, several companies have already announced the availability of PCIe 5.0 controllers and PHY IP, and some have demonstrated interoperability of their CXL-enabled PCIe 5.0 solutions with Intel's Sapphire Rapids or verification equipment, whereas Microchip even announced its PCIe 5.0 retimers and switches. 

"With our new PCIe Gen5 enterprise SSD controllers sampling in the second half of next year, we are not expecting our enterprise SSD controller to be a material contributor to our $1 billion sales objective," said Wallace Kuo, chief executive of Silicon Motion, during a conference call with analysts and investors (via The Motley Fool). "We are planning on material enterprise SSD controller sales contribution only after 2023." The chief executive of Silicon Motion naturally did not touch upon technical specifications of the company's upcoming PCIe 5.0 enterprise SSD controller, but its latest SM8266 SoC supports NVMe 1.4, three dual-core Arm Cortex-R5 complexes, 16 NAND channels, and configurable LDPC ECC.

 

My thoughts

This is good news...........in a way. For the moment it seems that these drives will first hit Servers and then slowly trickle down to the consumer space, so I don't really expect this to really matter to consumers until at least 2023 (I could be wrong). And as for the speeds, I'd say that not very many people need those speeds but that was told by people of SSDs and PCIe 4.0, so yea.

Sources

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/silicon-motion-pcie-50-enterprise-ssd-controller

[Drama Lama]

is there any announced processor besides power 10 that has PCIe 5.0?

[Lightwreather]

1 minute ago, Drama Lama said:

is there any announced processor besides power 10 that has PCIe 5.0?

It says in the quote right there that alder lake is supposed to have PCIe 5.0

 

[Drama Lama]

Just now, J-from-Nucleon said:

It says in the quote right there that alder lake is supposed to have PCIe 5.0

 

oops

[Entropy.]

14 minutes ago, Drama Lama said:

is there any announced processor besides power 10 that has PCIe 5.0?

Alder lake and Raphael chips coming out this year I beileve will launch with pcie gen-5 and ddr5 support. 

[Fnige]

So we're just gonna leave gen 4 behind already? What happened for it to only live that long

[Doobeedoo]

Neat for faster bandwidth and more I/O too.

Now hopefully we see consumer versions of lower latency SSDs like Samsung Z SSD that would be amazing. Too add DirectStorage on top, it will be awesome!

[tim0901]

13 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

The standard have been out for quite some time (2017). AMD supports it since 2019, the year Gen5 specs got released. Intel is the one holding things back.

Also it doesn't help that there wasn't much consumer demand for anything faster than Gen 3 - even now barely anyone actually needs Gen 4 speeds - and as such it was around for far longer than anyone imagined.

 

I am worried about Gen 5 though. Gen 4 is supposed to be rather difficult to implement already, requiring rather short traces in comparison to Gen 3 (without having to spend more on signal repeaters). This is why Gen 4 riser cards are so rare, but also why they're so short when you do find one. So Gen 5 could be even more finnicky in this regard.

 

Fun fact: Gen 6 is planned to be finalised this year. Double the transfer rate but also featuring PAM-4 and ECC to sort out the signal integrity issues.

[cj09beira]

15 hours ago, SlimyPython said:

So we're just gonna leave gen 4 behind already? What happened for it to only live that long

with pcie 5.0 a bunch of new data protocols will release that will use pcie 5.0 as a base, and those changes are making it very appealing for companies, some allow thing like asymmetric connections (so if you had a bunch of nvme x4 (pcie x4 has 4 down connections  4 up ) lane drives that you mostly only write to, you could set them up as 6 down 2 up   instead allowing for a better utilization of the available lanes), lower latency, better connectors etc, the main ones are CXL and gen Z

[porina]

13 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

The standard have been out for quite some time (2017). AMD supports it since 2019, the year Gen5 specs got released. Intel is the one holding things back.

The first PCIe 3.0 consumer mainstream offerings were with Sandy Bridge in 2011. AMD bought us PCIe 4.0 with Zen 2 in August 2019, and Intel followed up with Tiger Lake in September 2020. 8+ years is a pretty long time in technology without an update, needed or not. And that was the problem. Early 4.0 SSDs were barely any faster than good 3.0 ones while massively more expensive, and GPU support made next to no difference for gaming uses. 4.0 SSDs have finally got a bit faster in sequential but you're still going to pay a big premium for it. This problem doesn't exactly go away with 5.0... but with a bit more momentum maybe we'll get that extra performance without a big price premium and software will start to make better use of it.

[cj09beira]

21 minutes ago, porina said:

The first PCIe 3.0 consumer mainstream offerings were with Sandy Bridge in 2011. AMD bought us PCIe 4.0 with Zen 2 in August 2019, and Intel followed up with Tiger Lake in September 2020. 8+ years is a pretty long time in technology without an update, needed or not. And that was the problem. Early 4.0 SSDs were barely any faster than good 3.0 ones while massively more expensive, and GPU support made next to no difference for gaming uses. 4.0 SSDs have finally got a bit faster in sequential but you're still going to pay a big premium for it. This problem doesn't exactly go away with 5.0... but with a bit more momentum maybe we'll get that extra performance without a big price premium and software will start to make better use of it.

with pcie 5 what we might see is devices going for less lanes allowing you to have more with less, for performance to keep increasing in many areas we need latency to go down, as it seems pcie protocols and nvme aren't that fast, optane shows this perfectly hopefully cxl and gen z help with this