Silicon Motion Says Its SM2508 “Gen5” SSD Controller Delivers The Best Performance/Watt, Now Launched

Silicon Motion Says Its SM2508 "Gen5" SSD Controller Delivers The Best Performance/Watt, Now Launched 1

Silicon Motion paves the path for faster and more efficient consumer Gen5 SSD solutions with its SM2508 controller.

PCI-E 5.0 interface unlocks a bandwidth of over 14GB/s in sequential read and write speeds and it looks like more storage drive manufacturers are joining this race to maximize this potential. Now, Silicon Motion has finally launched its fastest NVMe SSD controller yet, using the PCIe Gen5 SSD interface.

The Silicon Motion "SM2508" Gen5 SSD controller is said to operate at a whopping 14.5GB/s sequential read speed, which is equivalent to the advertised SQ read speed of the Crucial T705, one of the fastest SSDs available in the market for consumers at the moment.

PCIe Gen5 x4, NVMe2.0

8 NAND flash channels, up to 3600MT/s

TSMC’s 6nm process

Powerful quad-core Arm Cortex-R8 CPU supporting four PCIe lanes of 32Gb/s data transfer speed

Up to 14.5GB/s and 13.6GB/s sequential performance and up to 2.5M IOPS random performance

Support the latest 3D TLC/QLC NAND

The maximum SQ write speed of this SSD is 13.6GB/s, the fastest we have heard till now, yielding random performance of up to 2.5M IOPS. Compare it to the T705 and Gigabyte's Aorus Gen5 14000 SSD, the maximum SQ write speed maxes out at 12.7GB/s for them. Similar to Gigabyte, SK Hynix has also announced its fastest SSDs yet but the selling point of the Silicon Motion's Gen5 controller is its power-efficiency which is said to be a step ahead of the Phison E26 controller.

PCI-E 5.0 SSDs typically consume around 10W or more when executing various read and write operations but the Silicon Motion Gen5 SSD controller excels at saving power without sacrificing performance. The SM2508 controller has a power consumption of just 3.5 watts with a maximum power consumption of 7 watts for the full SSD, saving as much as 1.7 times the energy compared to other controllers currently being used on PCI-E SSDs.

Silicon Motion states, "Solid-state hard drift storage solutions are constantly being developed to meet the new challenges posed by future AI applications that require data efficiency and high-performance models." indicating that the new SSD is optimized for AI operations where high performance and efficiency are crucial.

It further adds, "Our PCIe Gen5 solid-state hard disk controller has the best energy efficiency of its kind. It aims to meet the unique needs of today's AI function PC and provide high performance and high energy efficiency to meet the evolving AI PC standards in the future." which is exactly what the SM2508 controller does in SSDs.

As per the report, the Silicon Motion SM2508 Gen5 SSD controller entered mass production in April of this year. The controller was first revealed in Flash Memory Summit 2023 held in August last year and was once again demoed at Computex. The Silicon Motion SM2508 controller is built on TSMC's N6 node and is expected to launch in Q4 this year with multiple SSD storage solutions in the works from multiple vendors.