Silicon Movement Demos Low-Energy PCie 5.0 SSD Controller: SM2508

Rounding out our Computex 2024 SSD controller information, let’s speak concerning the ultimate main controller vendor on the present: Silicon Movement. Silicon Movement has been considerably late to the PCIe Gen5 SSD celebration, as its rival Phison has been providing their high-end PS5026-E26 controller for nearly 18 months now. However as Silicon Movement will get able to make the transition to PCIe 5.0, the corporate has a trump card up its sleeve: the SM2508 controller, an energy-efficient high-end SSD controller that’s supposed for lower-power drives.

A PCIe Gen5 x4 controller, SMI’s SM2508 boasts a really low energetic energy consumption of three.5W. Which, put in in an M.2 SSD, is meant to permit drive producers to constructed 7 Watt (or decrease) SSDs, in keeping with the corporate. The SM2508 is made on TSMC’s N6 course of expertise, which is a 7nm-class fabrication node with an optical shrink, which is able to make it one of many (if not the) most superior controllers available on the market as soon as it ships. The comparatively refined node permits Silicon Movement to pack extra cores and extra options into its controller whereas protecting its energy consumption in test – to not point out the chip measurement.

Underneath the hood, the front-end of the SM2508 SSD controller relies round 4 Arm Cortex-R8 cores, which is able to make it a notably highly effective controller (Phison’s E26, for reference, is 2 Arm Cortex R5 cores with an accelerator). This controller is supposed for use with DRAM, as properly, and can help each DDR4 and LPDDR4.

The back-end of the chip gives eight NAND channels with 32 CE targets, supporting interface speeds as much as 3600 MT/s. Altogether, SMI says that the controller can hit sequential learn speeds of as much as 14.5GB/sec and write speeds of as much as 14 GB/s, whereas 4K random learn and write efficiency will attain as much as 2.5 million IOPS. And SMI’s demo drive at Computex did even higher than that, reaching a 14.9GB/sec learn velocity beneath CrystalDiskMark.

Silicon Movement and its companions are at present finalizing the firmware for the SM2508 and qualifying it with numerous producers’ TLC NAND. The chip additionally helps QLC NAND, although we would be stunned to see anybody pair such a robust controller with slower NAND so quickly.

At Computex, Silicon Movement itself demonstrated an SM2508 drive in motion at its sales space. Varied drive producers additionally had SM2508-based drives on the ground as properly, although solely as static samples.