Adata’s booth at CES 2023 featured several surprises, including the first PCIe 5.0 SSD with SMI (up to 14 GB/s), new CXL 1.1 DDR5 devices, and the company’s new portable SSD, which won a CES Innovation Award. had. computer peripherals. The exhibit also confirmed that SMI’s PCIe 5.0 SSD controller is faster than the Phison E26-powered model that hits the market in the coming months.
Adata was one of the early SSD pioneers and has a history of using nearly every type of SSD controller available. However, Silicon Motion’s future 2508 controller is still in the works, so it was amazing to see the peak speeds achievable with Adata’s configuration. The preview gives a good idea of how PCIe 5.0 SSDs will perform other than Phison’s E26-powered ones that dominate the current crop of new PCIe 5.0 drives.
A 12nm Silicon Motion (SMI) SM 2508 SSD controller powers Adata’s as-yet-unbranded ‘XPG PCIe GEN5 SSD’. The drive delivers up to 14 GB/s sequential read throughput, saturating the PCIe 5 bus, and 12 GB/s sequential write throughput, 200 MB/s faster than an E26-powered SSD.
Adata also claims that the drive delivers 2 million random read/write IOPS, outperforming the Phison E26 by 500,000 IOPS in random write workloads. This level of performance is particularly impressive considering that the SM 2508 is a 4-channel controller while the E26 is an 8-channel controller.
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Adata plans to feature up to 8TB SSDs in the controller, but didn’t specify what type of NAND they used to reach this level of performance. However, the company plans to certify multiple types of NAND in the controller.
The M.2 bus currently supports up to 11.5W of power to M.2 SSDs, and PCIe 5.0 SSDs are expected to start pushing these higher power limits. PCIe 5.0 SSDs need stronger cooling to reach peak performance. There are also many indications that high performance models will require aggressive cooling, such as the early Phison E26 sample we recently tested.
Adata’s SMI-equipped SSDs have integrated fans built into the heatsinks, but these types of small fans typically make a screeching noise, but Adata says the noise level is negligible. As you can see in the photo above, this makes sense given that the fan is located under a top cover that has air channels with openings on each end. must contain meaningful noise.
Adata also touts the heatsink as being the “world’s first” to use a crystallization process that is said to lower temperatures and aid heat dissipation. The drive is sandwiched between a heatsink and a stainless steel baseplate (the baseplate and heatsink are latched together).
We look forward to testing the drives, but Adata is not yet ready to comment on final specifications, pricing or availability. Adata’s SSD seems to be a little further than expected. SMI also plans to bring a scaled-down four-channel version of the SM2508, the SM 2507, to the market in 2024. Meanwhile, SMI is sampling a full-featured 16-channel MonTitan PCIe 5.0 x8 SSD controller to data center customers. Production will begin this quarter.
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We also spotted Adata’s new CXL 1.1 memory modules that can accommodate up to 512 GB of DDR5 memory communicating over a PCIe 5.0 x4 bus. The module comes in his E3.S form factor so it can be plugged into a configuration similar to the 2.5″ NVMe drive bays on the front of the server, or into a bespoke backplane in a separate chassis. can.
Single RISC-V powered Montage MXC (M88MX5891) CXL memory expanders combine DDR5 memory chips and allow 32, 64, 128, 256 or 512GB of DRAM to be placed in a single device roughly the size of a 2.5 inch U.2 SSD. The controller conforms to CXL 1.1 and 2.0 RAS specifications. There are CXL.mem and CXl.io protocols in the menu for memory expansion.
Compute Express Link (CXL) devices allow server processors to address remotely located memory (DDR5 in this case) as local memory. The general latency impact is comparable to the standard he NUMA hop impact, so it’s perfectly capable of handling many kinds of workloads that value extra memory capacity. Adata is now ready to manufacture these cards in various flavors of memory, but these are reserved for custom orders such as large hyperscalers, so you won’t see them in retail stores. You can read all the details of the CXL specification here.
AMD’s EPYC Genoa and Intel’s Sapphire Rapids both support CXL, so we expect these types of devices to find a lot of users in the next few years.
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Adata’s SE920 won a CES award at the show. This device has a USB4 interface running at 40Gbps. The Asmedia ASM2464PD controller powers the drive for sequential read/write throughput up to 3,800/3,2000 MB/s.
The cover is slidable and the drive works in the closed position (1st and 2nd pics) or can be extended to open a large recess in the middle of the drive (3rd and 4th pics) . Extending the drive opens an air channel in the center of the device that engages a small internal fan (not shown here) that exhausts air through a small hole on top of the device to cool the device. This is useful for long file transfers that require maximum performance. The drive connects to the host via a USB-C connection.
The SE920 retails for around $150-$170 for the 1 TB model and $300 for the 2 TB model. It will be in stores by the end of April.
