During the opening hours of Computex 2022 Phison, AMD and Micron announced a strategic partnership to facilitate the development of PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs. As the event came to a close the development team were able to show off some of the performance expectations they have for the budding drives, handily exceeding the performance of todays Gen4 consumer products.



An engineering sample consisting of Phison PCIe Gen5 E26 controller and 1TB of Micron 3D TLC NAND pushed the CrystalDiskMark benchmark test to 12457 MB/s Read and 10022 MB/s write in sequential read tests with a queue depth of 16 (pretty standard criteria for assessing raw throughput). That's almost twice the performance of a similar Gen4 SSD on the market today and, as Phison's marketing would have it, effectively removes the SSD as a system bottleneck.

The drive still has some of the hallmarks of a engineering sample however. As reported by Techspot it has relatively limited IOPs for 4K random reads - just 16,000 IOPS - while current drives from their competitors might be able to push 22,000 IOPS in this metric. We'd expect this and other aspects of the solution to improve as the design matures into a client and business product in the coming months.

One other curious aspect of the drive design is that it utilises a wide M.2 standard, namely the M.2 2580 form factor. This may be slimmed down to the ubiquitous M.2 2280 once it reaches a productised form, but it's certainly something motherboard manufacturers will need to take into account when the new AMD and Intel desktop platforms release in Q4 2022. GIGABYTE specifically have already signalled support for the wider specification in their upcoming X670E/X670 'boards.

NVMe SSDs equipped with Phison's PCIe Gen5 E26 controller are expected to arrive in time for the debut of AMD 600-series motherboards and Ryzen 7000-series CPUs in the fall.

SOURCE: Phison Gen5 SSD Controller Demo (youtube), Techspot