Marvell's new PCIe 5.0 SSD controller offers insane 14GB/sec!

Marvell is the first out of the gate to reveal the industry's first PCIe 5.0 SSD controller, the new Bravera SC5 supports PCIe 5.0 and NVMe 1.4b standards which offers up to an insane 14GB/sec of bandwidth.

3

PCIe 5.0 enabled SSDs will have 32GT/s of bandwidth to play with, up from the 16GT/s on offer with new PCIe 4.0 motherboards, and up from the 8GT/s we've been using for the last 10 years with the older PCIe 3.0 standard.

Thad Omura, vice president of marketing, Flash Business Unit at Marvell explains: "Bravera SC5 SSD controllers are first to market with innovative data center features that extend Marvell's flash storage technology leadership. We're working with the entire ecosystem to enable SSD vendors and Do-It-Yourself cloud service providers to deploy the most advanced flash storage solutions".

• Read more: Intel 12th Gen Core 'Alder Lake-S' launch in November: PCIe 5.0 + DDR5
• Read more: PCIe 4.0 is barely here and we're already seeing PCIe 5.0
• Read more: Silicon Motion says it's working on next-gen PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers
• Read more: AMD will support DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 in 2022, but Intel has DDR5 first
• Read more: SK Hynix: DDR5 memory in 2020, while DDR6 development begins

Marvell will be making the new Bravera SC5 SSD in two different variants, both for the data center market. The first is an 8-channel model (MV-SS1331) and a 16-channel model (MV-SS1333). Both of them will have up to 14GB/sec of sequential reads, and up to 9GB/sec of sequential writes. Between the drives, we're looking at 2 million IOPs and 1 million IOPs, respectively.

We should expect Marvell's competitors to follow suit in the coming months, but Marvell is ahead of the pack that has Silison Motion, Phison, and others that make SSD controllers lag behind with their PCIe 5.0 designs so far.