Silicon Motion already Designing SSD controllers based on PCIe 5.0 – 16 GBs
Yeah, this year we’re breaching the 7GB/sec marker for NVMe SSDs. However Silicon Motion is not going to wait (and neither are others), but the news today is that a PCIe 5.0 controller already is in the works.
During a quarterly earnings reveal they mentioned that initial PCIe 5.0 controllers will target data centers and that the first samples would arrive in H2 2022. For large-volume use of PCIe 5.0, the chip designer is aiming 2023 and later. Intel seems to be aiming for 2022 for the introduction of Sapphire Rapids, its first generation with PCIe 5.0 support.
| PCIe specifications bandwidth | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Throughput | Bandwidth per lane | Bandwidth x4 link | Bandwidth x16 link | |
| PCIe 3.0 | 8.0GT/s | 1 GB / s per lane | 4 GB/s | 16 GB/s |
| PCIe 4.0 | 16GT/s | 2 GB / s per lane | 8 GB/s | 32 GB/s |
| PCIe 5.0 | 32GT/s | 4 GB / s per lane | 16 GB/s | 64 GB/s |
Basically when you table things up, above you can see the full-speed x16 configuration. NVMe SSDs typically bind to x4 lanes, so that’s a possible theoretical 16 GB/sec we’re closing in ion.