Silicon Motion announced the first SSD controller with PCIe 5.0 support

At the Flash Memory Summit 2024 conference, Silicon Motion officially presented the new SM2508 SSD controller, which will become the basis of solid-state drives with the PCI Express 5.0 x4 interface.

The main advantage of this controller is its energy efficiency: the power consumption of an SM2508-based SSD will be less than 7 W, making it ideal for use in laptops without the risk of overheating. Such an indicator became possible thanks to the transition to TSMC’s 6-nm technological process.

The SM2508 controller is equipped with four ARM Cortex-R8 cores, compatible with the NVMe 2.0 protocol and supports eight NAND channels at a speed of up to 3600 MT/s. It also supports external DDR4/LPDDR4 buffer. The new platform will be used in drives with TLC and QLC 3D NAND chips.

According to Silicon Motion, SSDs based on the SM2508 will be able to achieve read speeds of up to 14.5 GB/s and write speeds of up to 14 GB/s, with a maximum speed of 2.5 million IOPS. Mass production of the SM2508 controller is scheduled to begin next quarter, and SSDs based on it will be available later.