Silicon Motion unveils its 28 GB/s SM8466 PCIe 6.0 SSD controller

Silicon Motion unveils its first PCIe 6.0 SSD controller at 2025’s Flash Memory Summit

Silicon Motion has officially unveiled its new SM8466 SSD controller, a next-generation PCIe 6.0 controller for enterprise-grade storage solutions. Using this controller, Silicon Motion has achieved sequential read speeds of 28 GB/s and random performance of 7,000K IOPS. That’s around twice as fast as today’s PCIe 5.0 SSD.

AMD has confirmed that its next-generation EPYC CPUs will support PCIe 6.0. Intel is also expected to support PCIe 6.0 with its Diamond Rapids series CPUs. This means that next year’s enterprise systems will support PCIe 6.0, opening the door to faster storage solutions.

Silicon Motion’s new controller offers support for up to 512TB of NAND and is compatible with NVMe 2.0+ and version 2.5 of the OCP NVMe SSD Specification. Note that this new SSD controller utilises TSMC’s 4nm lithography node, the same node that AMD has employed to manufacture its Ryzen 9000 series desktop CPUs. It is uncommon for SSD controllers to use the same lithography node as current-generation processors. This implies that Silicon Motion’s new SM8466 SSD controller could be more expensive than normal.

(Image from ITHOME – Translated through Google Translate)

The Silicon Motion SM8466 is intended for enterprise-grade products. As such, we do not expect to see this SSD controller integrated into consumer-grade PC hardware anytime soon. PCIe 6.0 is coming to next-generation server CPUs, but it is unlikely to be seen on next-generation consumer CPUs. Simply put, PCIe 6.0 support will make new CPUs and motherboards more expensive, and hardware manufacturers don’t see the need for PCIe 6.0 products in today’s market.

If consumers see little reason to upgrade from PCIe 4.0 to PCIe 5.0, there is even less need to upgrade to PCIe 6.0.

You can join the discussion on Silicon Motion’s PCIe 6.0 SSD controller on the OC3D Forums.