Silicon Motion’s SM2508 Gen5 SSD Controller To Deliver Up To 14.5 GB/s Transfer, 2.5 Million IOPS, 6nm ARM CPU

Silicon Motion has detailed its upcoming SM2508 Gen5 SSD controller which will rival Phison's E26 with an aim at high-end storage devices.

Following its previous announcement at the FMS 2023 (Flash Memory Summit), Silicon Motion unveiled new data points for its upcoming SM2508 Gen5 SSD controller during the MTS "Memory Trend Summit" 2024 event. The company highlighted some more details which we have listed below.

First of all, it looks like Silicon Motion has bumped up the rated transfer speeds by a bit since the last time we heard about the next-gen controller. The transfer speeds are now rated at up to 14.5 GB/s Read and 14.0 GB/s Write versus the 14 GB/s (Read/Write) speeds, previously. The controller still offers up to 2.5 Million IOPS and supports 3D TLC/QLC NAND Flash.

One of the biggest talking points about SiliconMotion's new SM2508 controller is the fact that it operates at just 3.5W TDP which could lead to much more efficient PCIe Gen5 SSD designs. This is slightly lower than the 5W power consumption rated for the Phison E26 controller and should lead to slightly cooler designs and fewer thermal throttling instances.

We might even see some slimmer & passive cooling solutions since Phison E26 high-end designs are mostly active-cooled & use very large heatsinks with a few variants from Corsair even including a liquid-cooling twist. However, we have also seen ADATA's Project Neostorm Gen5 SSD using a water-cooling solution & that's based on the SM2508 controller.

Another important thing is that the Silicon Motion SM2508 controller will support up to 8-Channel DRAM running at 3600 MT/s speeds which is a nice boost over the 8-Channel 2400 MT/s DRAM on the Phison E26 controller. The controller also houses an ARM-based CPU featuring 4 Cortex-R8 cores running at 1.25 GHz and a single Cortex-M0 core. The SSD controller is built upon the new 6nm EUV process from TSMC and reduces power by up to 45% versus the 12nm designs.

Currently, Silicon Motion is anticipating the wide adoption of PCIe Gen5 SSD devices by 2025 as it is expecting the drive to gain higher mainstream and enthusiast traction in the coming year. There is also going to be a mainstream SM2504XT Gen5 SSD controller which was previously expected at the end of this year but should widely be available in 2024.