Silicon Movement is already growing its first SSD controller for drives with a PCIe 6.0 interface. The brand new controller known as SM8466 and belongs to the MonTitan household of SSD controllers for datacenters and enterprise.
Wallace C. Kou, chief government of Silicon Movement made the brief announcement of the corporate’s inaugural PCIe 6.0 SSD controller in his column for ChinaFlashMarket.com. The CEO of SMI didn’t reveal many particulars in regards to the firm’s SM8466 PCIe Gen6 SSD controller, although we are able to make an informed guess that the chip will characteristic a PCIe 6.0 x4 interface and can purpose for an as much as 30.25 GB/s bandwidth in every course, a 2X efficiency improve in comparison with drives with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. Clearly, since we’re coping with a Mon Titan controller — and primarily based on the naming scheme, we’re certainly coping with enterprise-oriented silicon — anticipate it to characteristic all of the enterprise-grade security capabilities.
One of many attention-grabbing questions on Silicon Movement’s Mon Titan SM8466 controller is which course of know-how SMI plans to make use of for its manufacturing. The corporate has by no means revealed the manufacturing technique of its SM8366 controller launched in 2022, although its client-oriented SM2508 PCIe 5.0 x4 controller — which powers a few of the best SSDs — that’s coming into the market lately makes use of TSMC’s N6 (6nm-class) fabrication course of. In any case, the brand new SM2466 is poised to make use of a brand new manufacturing node and due to this fact pack extra processing cores, which is able to allow higher efficiency, options, and enhanced compatibility with next-generation 3D TLC and 3D QLC forms of NAND reminiscence.
At this level, we don’t know whether or not Silicon Movement’s growth of its first PCIe 6.0 x4 controller is on the early phases of growth or additional alongside. In any case, the very point out of the venture signifies that the work is in progress, so anticipate SMI-based drives with a PCIe 6.0 x4 interface sooner or later.
Silicon Movement is considerably behind its important competitor with its PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers. Phison was forward of the entire business with its PS5026-E26 controller with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. Whereas the chip was initially used for consumer drives, it was designed to energy each consumer and datacenter SSDs. Consequently, the E26 competes towards SMI’s MonTitan SM8366 which is a extra highly effective controller positioned to struggle for the higher-end of the enterprise market.
