Phison Electronics recently announced a brand new E18 SSD controller chip, one that hinges on the new PCIe 4.0 interface to achieve breakneck read and write speeds. The controller chip is a follow-up to the company’s 1st generation E16 controller, which was released back in 2019.
As per the brand’s official statement, its new E18 controller is based on TSMC’s 12nm process node and enables next-generation SSDS to reach sequential read and write speeds of up to 7.4GB/s and 7GB/s, respectively. At current, only a handful of PCIe 4.0 SSDs are capable of reaching such read speeds, chief among them being the WD SN850 PCIe 4.0 that launched in October and is capable of reaching read speeds of 7GB/s, but write speeds of 4.1GB/s only.
On that note, the E18 is currently the only controller capable of sustaining 7GB/s across the board, which could give it an advantage over its rival when it becomes more widely adopted. Additionally, the E18 also has eight channels and capable of serving up to 1200MT/s per channel, meaning that it could support capacities of up to 8TB. Oh, and it also supports Phison’s CoXProcessor 2.0 technology.
PCIe 4.0 first came on to the scene with the launch of AMD’s 3rd generation Ryzen and while the interface is significantly faster than the last generation PCIe 3.0, its adoption is not as widespread, especially for the desktop PC segment; Intel is only expected to fully adopt the new interface next year, and finally bringing the chipmaker on to the same level with AMD, sort of.
Over at the gaming console market though, both the Microsoft Xbox Series X and Sony PlayStation 5 will take advantage of high-speed PCIe 4.0 SSDs, with room for a storage expansion further down the line.
At the time of writing, Phison did not specify when its E18 controller will see distribution, or who its clients for the new component are.
(Source: Businesswire via Hot Hardware)
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