It will be designed for enterprise SSDs
Silicon Motion announced this week that it would begin shipping samples of PCIe Gen 5.0 SSD controllers in the second half of next year. They will target the enterprise solid-state drives that hit the market in 2022. Of course, consumer segment models will also be released, but the manufacturer is still silent about them.
Silicon Motion promises to release PCIe 5.0 SSD controller next year
As you know, the data transfer rate on a single PCIe 5.0 lane reaches 32 GT / s, so a drive with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface will be able to demonstrate speeds up to 16 GB / s – twice as fast as models with PCIe 4.0 x4.
Platform-level PCIe 5.0 support is expected later this year, but the next generation’s transition will not be quick. The rollout is expected to start in data center hardware. Recall that Microchip recently introduced PCIe 5.0 switch chips. Several other vendors have announced the availability of PCIe 5.0 controllers and IP cores that provide physical layer interface (PHY) functionality. However, the SSD controllers’ developers only presented products with PCIe 4.0 support in the second half of last year, so they are unlikely to rush to replace them…