Huge Performance, Minimal Power – The Silicon Motion will transform the PCIe 5.0 SSD market

Silicon Motion is ready to transform the PCIe 5.0 SSD market with their ultra-efficient SM2508 controller

Many of today’s PCIe 5.0 SSDs run hot, but that doesn’t need to be the case. At the 2024 Flash Memory Summit, Silicon Motion has officially launched their new power-efficient SM2508 PCIe for SSD controller. With this controller, Silicon Motion has proved that ultra-high performance levels don’t need high levels of power consumption.

With up to 14.5 GB/s and 13.6 GB/s sequential read/write performance and up to 2.5M IOPS random performance, the SM2508 controller is fast. Thanks to its efficient design and TSMC 6nm lithography, this controller consumes very little power. This will allow the next generation of PCIe 5.0 SSDs to run cooler than their predecessors. This means that they won’t need huge heatsink designs or active cooling solutions. With this new controller, top-tier PCIe 5.0 SSD performance will finally be viable for the notebook/laptop market.

Silicon Motion’s SM2508 is a superior-performance, low-power PCIe Gen 5 x4 NVMe 2.0 SSD controller designed for AI-capable PC notebooks. It supports eight NAND channels with up to 3,600 MT/s per channel, delivering sequential performance speeds of up to 14.5 GB/s and 13.6 GB/s and random performance speeds of up to 2.5M IOPS, providing up to 2x higher performance than PCIe Gen 4 products. The SM2508 maximizes PCIe Gen 5 performance with an impressive power consumption of approximately 3 W. It features Silicon Motion’s proprietary 8th-generation NANDXtend technology, which includes an on-disk training algorithm designed to reduce ECC timing. This enhancement boosts performance and maximizes power efficiency while ensuring compatibility with the latest 3D TLC/QLC NAND technologies, enabling higher data density and meeting the evolving demands of next-generation AI PCs.

Silicon Motion has claimed that tis new SSD controller is up to 70% more power efficient than competing PCIe 5.0 SSDs. With less than 7 watts of power consumption for entire M.2 NVMe SSDs. This controller will also support the latest 3D NAND, which includes both TLC and QLC NAND types.

Silicon Motion SM2508 specifications:

• PCIe Gen 5 x4, NVMe 2.0
• 8 NAND flash channels, up to 3600MT/s
• TSMC’s 6 nm process
• Powerful quad-core Arm Cortex -R8 CPU supporting four PCIe lanes of 32 Gb/s data transfer speed
• Up to 14.5 GB/s and 13.6 GB/s sequential performance and up to 2.5M IOPS random performance
• Support the latest 3D TLC/QLC NAND

Silicon Motion has confirmed that their new, power efficient PCIe 5.0 SSD controller will see its production ramp in Q4 2024. Samples of these controller are already available to multiple “major SSD vendors” and major NAND manufacturers. This will make 2025 an exciting time for the PCIe 5.0 SSD market.

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