Silicon Motion Launches PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD Controllers
by Billy Tallis on October 20, 2020 2:15 PM ESTSilicon Motion has announced the official launch of their first generation of PCIe 4.0-capable NVMe SSD controllers. These controllers have been on the roadmap for quite a while and have been previewed at trade shows, but the first models are now shipping. The high-end SM2264 and mainstream SM2267/SM2267XT controllers will enable consumer SSDs that move beyond the performance limits of the PCIe 3.0 x4 interface that has been the standard for almost all previous consumer NVMe SSDs.
The high-end SM2264 controller is the successor to Silicon Motion's SM2262(EN) controllers, and the SM2264 brings the most significant changes that add up to a doubling of performance. The SM2264 still uses 8 NAND channels, but now supporting double the speed: up to 1600MT/s. The controller includes four ARM Cortex R8 cores, compared to two cores on SMI's previous client/consumer NVMe controllers. As with most SSD controllers aiming for the high end PCIe 4.0 product segment, the SM2264 is fabbed on a smaller node: TSMC's 12nm FinFET process, which allows for substantially better power efficiency than the 28nm planar process used by the preceding generation of SSD controllers. The SM2264 also includes support for some enterprise-oriented features like SR-IOV virtualization, though we probably won't see that enabled on consumer SSD products. The SM2264 also includes the latest generation of Silicon Motion's NANDXtend ECC system, which switches from a 2kb to 4kB codeword size for the LDPC error correction.
The SM2264 controller will be competing with in-house controllers used by Samsung and Western Digital for their flagship consumer SSDs, and against the upcoming Phison E18 controller. Phison's E16 controller was the first consumer PCIe 4.0 controller to hit the market, but is now being outclassed by a second wave of PCIe 4.0 controllers that come much closer to using the full potential of a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface. The SM2264 controller is currently sampling to drive vendors, but we don't have an estimate for when products will be hitting the shelves.
Silicon Motion Client/Consumer NVMe SSD Controllers | ||||||||
SM2263(XT) | SM2267(XT) | SM2262EN | SM2264 | |||||
Market Segment | Mainstream Consumer | High-End Consumer | ||||||
Manufacturing Process |
28nm | 28nm | 28nm | 12nm | ||||
Arm CPU Cores | 2x Cortex | 2x Cortex R5 | 2x Cortex | 4x Cortex R8 | ||||
Error Correction | 2kB LDPC | 2kB LDPC | 2kB LDPC | 4kB LDPC | ||||
DRAM Support | LPDDR3, DDR4 -XT: None |
LPDDR4, DDR4 -XT: None |
LPDDR3, DDR4 | LPDDR4, DDR4 | ||||
Host Interface | PCIe 3.0 x4 | PCIe 4.0 x4 | PCIe 3.0 x4 | PCIe 4.0 x4 | ||||
NAND Channels, Interface Speed | 4ch 667 MT/s |
4ch 1200MT/s |
8ch 800MT/s |
8ch 1600MT/s |
||||
CEs per Channel | 4 | 8 -XT: 4 |
4 | 8 | ||||
Sequential Read | 2400 MB/s | 3900 MB/s | 3500 MB/s | 7400 MB/s | ||||
Sequential Write | 1700 MB/s | 3500 MB/s | 3000 MB/s | 6800 MB/s | ||||
4KB Random Read IOPS | 300k -XT: 280k |
500k | 420k | 1000k | ||||
4KB Random Write IOPS | 250k | 500k | 420k | 1000k |
For the more mainstream product segments, Silicon Motion's SM2267 and SM2267XT controllers are the replacements for the SM2263 and SM2263XT. These will help bring entry-level NVMe performance up to about the level that used to be standard for high-end PCIe 3.0 SSDs. The SM2267XT is the DRAMless variant of the SM2267 and also has half as many chip enables (CEs), which allow for a much smaller package size suitable for use on small form factors like M.2 2230. The SM2267(XT) controllers are still manufactured on the cheaper 28nm process. The SM2267 and SM2267XT controllers are in mass production and the first products using those parts have also entered the supply chain: we already have a sample of ADATA's Gammix S50 Lite with the SM2267 controller on our test bench.
The SM2267 will be competing against a mix of older 8-channel controllers like the Phison E12, and newer 4-channel solutions as seen in the SK hynix Gold P31. We expect this to be the most important consumer SSD product segment going into 2021 as these drives will not carry the steep price premium currently seen on high-end 8-channel PCIe 4.0 SSDs, and they'll still be plenty fast for almost all use cases. The DRAMless SM2267XT variant will be competing against controllers like the Phison E19T for entry-level NVMe SSDs that carry little or no price premium over SATA drives. These low-cost NVMe controllers are also increasingly popular for portable SSDs; the performance increases of the SM2267XT over the SM2263XT will not matter for drives using 20Gb/s USB to NVMe bridge chips, but will be helpful for Thunderbolt SSDs.
Related Reading
- The Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 SSD Review: A Spirit of Hope
- Western Digital Launches New WD Black NVMe SSDs And Thunderbolt Dock
- CES 2020: ADATA Preparing Three PCIe 4.0 Consumer SSDs
- Silicon Motion: PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD Controller in Development, Coming Q2 2020
- Phison At CES 2020: Preparing For QLC To Go Mainstream
- Phison Previews Next-Gen PCIe 4.0 SSD Controllers: Up to 7 GB/s, NVMe 1.4
- Marvell Announces Client SSD Controllers With PCIe Gen4
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beginner99 - Wednesday, October 21, 2020 - link
Even Samsungs new PCIE 4 drives are medicore considering the change. For consumer workload what matters is latency and not bandwidth. A computer feels snappy ssd vs hdd due to the low latency and not the high bandwidth of the ssd. these ssds reach their bandwidth only with very high queue depth which you never have on consumer workloads anyway.Intels optane could have been the real jump here but they aren't offering any reasonable consumer drives with optane yet. Full speed at QD1. What all these tests are missing is a real-world copy&paste benchmark of a directory of small files on windows. Drive to drive. even modern ssd barley reach 50mb/s in such tests. These 7000mb/s figures are pure theoretic benchmark numbers
Kurosaki - Tuesday, October 20, 2020 - link
Please deliver more than the usual lot when it comes to more heavy payloads...7.9 GB/s doesn't mean anything if the same old games wont load any faster, windows still boots in 40MB/s and so on. All theese high numbers are just a play for the galleries, and the storage volume won't ever seem to grow. It baffles me that they still sell 512GB drives, for prices that would scare almost everyone. The drive market is heavily stagnated. The feeling of a monopoly waiting to be crushed grows by the day. Even if it has done so for the last effin ten years!
shabby - Tuesday, October 20, 2020 - link
I imagine the cpu is the bottleneck when it comes to loading games not the ssd anymore. All that data needs to be uncompressed/loaded into memory and gpu, that takes time.Kurosaki - Tuesday, October 20, 2020 - link
Then we have a platform problem and the speed of the disk is irrelevant. Why buy a more costly drive than necessary?silencer12 - Tuesday, October 20, 2020 - link
adult content. No matter the speed.wr3zzz - Tuesday, October 20, 2020 - link
I forgot where I read it but I think this is what has been implemented in PS5/XBSeX and what Microsoft is planning in future Windows.Stochastic - Tuesday, October 20, 2020 - link
Yup: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstora...Spunjji - Wednesday, October 21, 2020 - link
Why indeed? Buy an inexpensive drive and be happy that you get far more performance than high-end drives 4 years ago, at a lower price :)29a - Wednesday, October 21, 2020 - link
This is why.https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstora...
MikeMurphy - Tuesday, October 20, 2020 - link
Hardly stagnant. Eight years ago the talk was buying when SSD prices eventually reached $1 per GB. We're now at around $0.12 per GB and still dropping, while speeds have gone from 250 MB/s to north of 4 GB/s and still climbing.It's very exciting times in mass storage.