Silicon Motion has been teasing their SM2508 client SSD controller for more than a year now at various trade shows. The controller is finally set for mass production, just in time as the mainstream segment of the Gen 5 SSD market is poised to take off. Silicon Motion expects SSDs based on the SM2508 to be available for purchase by the end of the year.
At FMS 2024, the company was reusing the same information cards seen at Computex in June. The specifications of the SM2508 from our Computex coverage are reproduced here.
| Silicon Motion NVMe Client SSD Controller Comparison | ||||||||
| SM2508 | SM2264 | SM2268XT2 | SM2269XT | |||||
| Market Segment | High-End | Mainstream | ||||||
| Manufacturing Process | 6nm | 12nm | 12nm | 12nm | ||||
| CPU Cores | 4x Cortex R8 | 4x Cortex R8 | 2x Cortex R8 | 2x Cortex R8 | ||||
| Error Correction | 4K+ LDPC | 4K LDPC | 4K+ LDPC | 4K LDPC | ||||
| DRAM | DDR4, LPDDR4X | DDR4, LPDDR4X | No | No | ||||
| Host Interface | PCIe 5.0 x4 | PCIe 4.0 x4 | PCIe 4.0 x4 | PCIe 4.0 x4 | ||||
| NVMe Version | NVMe 2.0 | NVMe 1.4 | NVMe 2.0 | NVMe 1.4 | ||||
| NAND Channels, Interface Speed | 8 ch, 3600 MT/s |
8 ch, 1600 MT/s |
4 ch, 3600 MT/s |
4 ch, 1600 MT/s |
||||
| Sequential Read | 14.5 GB/s | 7.5 GB/s | 7.4 GB/s | 5.1 GB/s | ||||
| Sequential Write | 14 GB/s | 7 GB/s | 6.7 GB/s | 4.8 GB/s | ||||
| 4KB Random Read IOPS | 2500k | 1300k | 1200k | 900k | ||||
| 4KB Random Write IOPS | 2500k | 1200k | 1200k | 900k | ||||
Current Gen 5 SSDs in the consumer client market are currently all based on Phison's E26 controller. The appearance of newer platform solutions for SSD vendors is bound to be good from both an end-user pricing and adoption perspective.
