Phison Demonstrates PCIe 5.0 SSD Controller With Speed ​​Up to 12.5GB/s

Controller manufacturer Phison has demonstrated a PCIe 5.0 controller in combination with an X670 motherboard from ASUS. With a prototype SSD, read and write speeds of about 12.5 and 10 GB/s are achieved. PCIe 5.0 consumer SSDs will be released in the fall.

The prototype that Phison is demonstrating is based on the PS5026-E26 controller, which the manufacturer makes for PCIe 5.0 x4 SSDs. It offers a maximum throughput of 15.8GB/s, twice as much as what SSDs with a PCIe 4.0 x4 controller can achieve.

For the field test, Phison uses ‘the latest’ 3D TLC memory chips from Micron and an ASUS motherboard with the AMD X670 chipset. That motherboard is also a prototype, because X670 motherboards will only be released in the fall.

In CrystalDiskMark, the setup achieves sequential read and write speeds of approximately 12.5 and 10GB/s. The first consumer SSDs that actually achieve such speeds are expected at the end of this year. The AMD X670 platform gets 24 PCIe 5.0 lanes. This makes it possible to use two PCIe 5.0 x4 SSDs in combination with a video card that uses sixteen lanes.

Intel’s upcoming Raptor Lake platform will also support both SSDs and video cards with the PCIe 5.0 interface. It is not yet known how many lanes the Intel platform will receive. The current Alder Lake platform also supports PCIe 5.0, but is limited to 16 lanes.

Apacer and Zotac announced last week that they would come up with such SSDs and at the beginning of this year Team Group already showed a PCIe 5.0 SSD. Adata showed prototypes of PCIe 5.0 SSDs that would reach speeds of up to 14GB/s. With the announcements so far, no details have been disclosed about the controller and memory used.