American-Taiwanese NAND flash controller company Silicon Motion has debuted its next-generation PCI Express 6.0 controller, the SM8466. This controller will enable faster-than-ever storage devices at up to 28GB/s—close to double the sustained read and write speeds of the latest PCIe 5 SSDs (and more than Micron managed in March) . Supporting drives aren't expected to be available to consumers for at least another year, and no motherboards support it anyway. But for data centers and servers, this could open the door for some big performance improvements.
The latest generation consumer SSDs use the PCIe 5 interface, and the fastest of those can offer sustained read and write speeds just shy of 15,000MB/s, or 15GB/s. That's crazy fast, but it doesn't result in games loading much faster than PCIe 4 drives that are rated for half that speed. That's because most consumer software can't take advantage of these drives' insane bandwidth. But data centers, particularly those running the latest AI models or handling vast quantities of user data, can. Indeed, the more performance they have, the better.
Credit: SIlicon Motion.
The new PCIe 6 SSD controller from Silicon Motion will be at the heart of next-generation PCIe 6 SSDs, which in turn could all-but-double the performance of some major data center installs. Better yet, it also unlocks added capacity, letting servers use fewer SSDs for cost and power savings, or increase capacity. The new PCIe 6 controller will support capacities up to 512 TB. VideoCardz reports that it also supports next-generation 3D TLC and QLC NAND flash memory, and can be used in both NVMe 2.0+ and OCP NVMe SSD 2.5 standards.
If it was at all unclear that Silicon Motion is pitching this controller for enterprise solutions, the release also highlights its support for features that those kinds of customers would care more about than consumers. Features like multiple encryption standard support, secure boot, SR-IOV and MPF virtualization...I had to look that one up.
Still, enterprise adoption of new storage standards is usually the first stepping stone toward consumer adoption. We'll need new chipsets and CPUs that support PCIe 6 before the drives can be used outside of servers, and those are at least another year away, maybe longer. Hopefully, storage technologies like DirectStorage can see wider adoption among game developers so we can have more of a purpose for these super-speed drives—beyond just shuffling files between drives, at least.
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