In its first sighting on a Ryzen 7000 system outside of AMD’s own demos, Phison today at the 2022 Flash Memory Summit showed off a PCIe 5.0 SSD controller that delivers just over 10 GBps of throughput on Zen 4 powered systems. did.
Phison has partnered with AMD and Micron to launch the PS5026-E26 SSD controller (more commonly known as the E26), and these drives are expected to launch in September. Considering AMD said PCIe 5.0 SSDs would be available in time for Zen 4 launch, it looks like parts are in place for the rumored Ryzen 7000 launch which happens on September 15th. .
Phison’s test system apparently consists of a 6-core, 12-thread AMD processor on a development motherboard running a PCIe 5.0 interface. Unfortunately, Phison won’t share details about the system or test platform, but we do know that the chip is codenamed 100-000000593-20_Y. I can see one fan in VRM and his two sticks in DDR5 in the system, but I’m not allowed to take a closer look.
In previous demos, we already saw the E26 controller achieving up to 12GB/s throughput and providing up to 1.3M / 1.1M random read/write IOPS, but in this sample, the E26 is powered by Micron You can see it paired with the new 232-layer B58R TLC flash from . It’s the first time, so it’s still in the adjustment stage.
According to Micron, the new 232-layer TLC flash offers twice the write bandwidth and 75% higher read bandwidth than the previous version. But the move to a 6-plane architecture (from 4-plane) means companies like Phison will need to adjust their SSD controllers accordingly. For now this flash runs at 1600 MT/s, but will eventually reach 2000 MT/s.
We can see 10 GB/s read/write throughput on our AMD test system here, but Phison reminds us that this configuration is still in development. The company plans sequential read/write throughput of up to 12/11 GB/s and he IOPS of 1.5/2 million random read/writes when the final drives arrive on the market.
Phison is also preparing I/O+ firmware to optimize the SSD for DirectStorage workloads, which we recently tested with PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Not surprisingly, PCIe 5.0’s higher sequential performance is a perfect match for Microsoft’s DirectStorage. This is because we rely heavily on read throughput to reduce game load times to around 1 second.
AMD also says that Ryzen 7000 will support Smart Access Storage (SAS). This seems to be a slightly tweaked version of DirectStorage built on the same API. Given the close working relationship between Phison and AMD, we would expect his SSD from the company to support AMD’s SAS.
A close-up of the SSD shows the standard M.2 2280 form factor. That is the standard 22mm width. Recently, a new 25mm wide form factor was added to his NVMe specs. Ostensibly for PCIe 5.0 SSDs. However, Phison says it has no plans to create a wider form factor for E26-powered drives. The demo also shows that the SSD doesn’t have a heatsink attached, but Phison says that you’ll need a heatsink for the best performance.
A constellation of third-party SSDs uses Phison’s E26 PCIe 5.0 SSD controller. This helps Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 systems — AMD claims a 60% performance boost in sequential read workloads with PCIe 5.0 SSDs. The first of his E26 powered drives will appear in September.
