Silicon Motion SM2508: best perf-per-watt Gen5 SSD controller ready for next-gen AI PCs

Silicon Motion has just unveiled its new SM2508 Gen5 SSD controller, the best performance-per-watt Gen5 SSD controller at FMS 2024.

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The new Silicon Motion SM2508 Gen5 SSD controller is the world's first PCIe Gen5 client SSD controller using TSMC's 6nm EUV process node, which provides a 50% reduction in power consumption compared to other SSD controllers using the 12nm process node.

The company says that the entire SSD uses less than 7W of power, the new SM2508 Gen5 SSD controller has 1.7x better power efficiency than Gen4 SSDs and up to 70% better than competitive Gen5 SSDs already on the market.

Silicon Motion's new SM2508 Gen5 SSD is a superior-performance, low-power PCIe Gen5 x4 NVMe 2.0 SSD controller that the company designed for AI PCs like the recent, and continuing waves of Copilot+ PCs. It supports up to eight NAND channels with up to 3600MT/s per channel with read and write performance of up to 14.5GB/sec and 13.6GB/sec, respectively.

The new SM2508 Gen5 SSD controller maximizes Gen5 SSD performance with an impressive power consumption of approximately 3W, inside using Silicon Motion's in-house 8th-generation NANDXtrend technology, which features an on-disk training algorithm that has been designed to reduce ECC timing.

This small enhancement boosts performance and maximizes power efficiency while ensuring compatibility with the latest 3D TLC/QLD NAND technologies. It enables higher data density and meets the evolving demands of next-generation AI PCs.

Nelson Duann, Silicon Motion's Senior VP of Client & Automotive Storage Business, said: "SSD storage solutions are continuously evolving to meet the new challenges posed by future AI applications, which demand data efficiency and high-performance models. Our PCIe Gen5 SSD controller, with its best-in-class power efficiency, is designed to satisfy the unique demands of today's AIcapable PCs, delivering high performance and power efficiency to meet the evolving AI PC standards of tomorrow".

Silicon Motion SM2508 Gen5 SSD controller features:

• PCIe Gen5 x4, NVMe 2.0
• 8 NAND flash channels, up to 3600MT/s
• TSMC's 6nm process
• Powerful quad-core Arm Cortex-R8 CPU supporting four PCIe lanes of 32Gb/s data transfer speed
• Up to 14.5GB/sec and 13.6GB/sec sequential performance and up to 2.5M IOPS random performance
• Support the latest 3D TLC/QLC NAND