Silicon Motion has been promoting its SM2508 SSD controller at various trade shows for over a year. The controller is finally ready for mass production, just in time for the mainstream Gen 5 SSD market to take off. Silicon Motion expects SM2508-based SSDs to be available by the end of the year.
At FMS 2024, the company reused the same info cards we saw at Computex in June. The SM2508 specs from our Computex are reproduced here.
| Silicon Motion NVMe Client SSD Controller Comparison | ||||||||
| SM2508 | SM2264 | SM2268XT2 | SM2269XT | |||||
| Segment of the market | High class | Mainstream | ||||||
| Production process | 6nm | 12nm | 12nm | 12nm | ||||
| Processor cores | 4x Cortex R8 | 4x Cortex R8 | 2x Cortex R8 | 2x Cortex R8 | ||||
| Error correction | 4K+ LDPC | 4K LDPC | 4K+ LDPC | 4K LDPC | ||||
| THIMBLE | DDR4 memory | DDR4 memory | 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 channels, 3600 tons/sec |
8 channels, 1600 tons/sec |
4 channels, 3600 tons/sec |
4 channels, 1600 tons/sec |
||||
| Sequential reading | 14.5 GB/s | 7.5 GB/s | 7.4 GB/s | 5.1 GB/s | ||||
| Sequential write | 14GB/s | 7GB/s | 6.7 GB/s | 4.8 GB/s | ||||
| 4KB Random Read IOPS | 2500 thousand | 1300k | 1200k | 900k | ||||
| 4KB Random Write IOPS | 2500 thousand | 1200k | 1200k | 900k | ||||
Current Gen 5 SSDs in the consumer market are currently based on Phison’s E26 controller. The emergence of newer platform solutions for SSD vendors will certainly be beneficial from both an end-user pricing perspective and an adoption perspective.
