Silicon Motion introduces PCIe 4.0 SSD controllers

     With AMD's Ryzen 3000 series chips already supporting PCIe 4.0, new, faster SSDS are rushing to compete. Silicon Motion showcased a number of products that have been well received over the past few years thanks to strategic partnerships with numerous popular SSD vendors, and the company has multiple turnkey solutions.

     In the consumer category, SMI has two new PCIe 4.0 SSD controllers coming next year: the SM2264 and SM2267. While the SM2267 may look faster than the SM2264, it's actually a bit slower due to the four-channel architecture that uses DRAM, while rival Phison's next generation uses a DRAM free design, resulting in Phison controllers with read/write speeds of up to 4/3 GB/s. With a random performance of up to 400,000 read/write IOPS, it supports the latest 9x layer NAND in TLC and QLC styles and is ready for release next year.

     The SM2264, on the other hand, has an eight-channel design and is expected to achieve read speeds of up to 6.5GB/s and write speeds of 3.9GB/s, as well as 700,000 IOPS. So, it's a little less than Phison's recently announced E18 controller, and it doesn't look like SMI's controller will be NVMe 1.4 compatible just yet. Like the SM2267, it supports the latest NAND technology, which we should see sometime early next year, supporting up to 16TB of capacity, which is double the capacity of the SM2267.

     On the enterprise/data center side, SMI showcased its Shannon Systems SSD lineup, which includes a range of application-specific devices such as Key-Value and Open-Channel SSDS. SMI also exhibited a number of newer controllers and complete reference designs, such as the SM8108, SM2270 and SM2271 controllers. Silicon Motion has announced and offers most turnkey firmware and full SSD reference designs. Interestingly, SMI supports Toshiba's latest XL-Flash, which is very similar to Samsung's Z-NAND (speed-optimized SLC).