FMS 2024: Silicon Motion Launches Best Performance/Watt SM2508 PCIe Gen5 SSD Controller

Silicon Motion Technology Corporation announced SM2508, a best power efficiency PCIe Gen5 NVMe 2.0 client SSD controller for AI PCs and gaming consoles.

It’s a world’s 1st PCIe Gen5 client SSD controller using TSMC’s 6nm EUV process, offering a 50% reduction in power consumption compared to competitive offerings in the 12nm process. With less than 7W power consumption for the entire SSD, it delivers 1.7x better power efficiency than PCIe Gen4 SSDs and up to 70% better than current competitive PCIe Gen5 offerings on the market. The company will be showcasing its SM2508 based SSD design and other innovations during the Future of Memory and Storage event from Aug. 6 to 8, Santa Clara, CA.

The SM2508 is a superior-performance, low-power PCIe Gen5 x4 NVMe 2.0 SSD controller designed for AI-capable PC notebooks. It supports 8 NAND channels with up to 3,600MT/s per channel, delivering sequential performance speeds of up to 14.5GB/s and 13.6GB/s and random performance speeds of up to 2.5 million IOs, providing up to 2x higher performance than PCIe Gen4 products. The SM2508 maximizes PCIe Gen5 performance with a power consumption of approximately 3W. It features Silicon Motion’s proprietary 8th-gen NANDXtend technology, which includes an on-disk training algorithm designed to reduce ECC timing. This enhancement boosts performance and maximizes power efficiency while ensuring compatibility with the latest 3D TLC/QLC NAND technologies, enabling higher data density and meeting the evolving demands of next-gen AI PCs.

“SSD storage solutions are continuously evolving to meet the new challenges posed by future AI applications, which demand data efficiency and high-performance models,” said Nelson Duann, SVP, client and automotive storage business, Silicon Motion. “Our PCIe Gen5 SSD controller, with its best-in-class power efficiency, is designed to satisfy the unique demands of today’s AI-capable PCs, delivering high performance and power efficiency to meet the evolving AI PC standards of tomorrow.“

SM2508 specs include:

PCIe Gen5 x4, NVMe2.0
8 NAND flash channels, up to 3600MT/s
TSMC’s 6nm process
Powerful quad-core Arm Cortex-R8 CPU supporting 4 PCIe lanes of 32Gb/s data transfer speed
Up to 14.5GB/s and 13.6GB/s sequential performance and up to 2.5 million IO/s random performance
Support the latest 3D TLC/QLC NAND

The SM2508 is being designed by multiple major SSD vendors including major NAND vendors. Production ramp of SM2508 is targeted for 4Q24.

Besides SM2508, Silicon Motion exhibit will also include:
MonTitan PCIe Gen5 Enterprise SSD development platform for AI storage workloads

SM8366: 14GB/s sequential and 3.5 million IO/s random SSD performance, supporting capacities beyond 128TB with 16 channels providing up to 2,400MT/s of TLC and QLC NAND.
MonTitan: Multi-Dimensional QLC-based PCIe Gen5 SSDs: Enabled by FDP and PerformaShape technologies to maximize AI Training Pipeline performance.

UFS 4.0 and USB storage solutions for AI PCs and AI smartphones

SM2756 UFS4.0 controller: 65% more power-efficient than previous-gen UFS 3.1.
SM2322 USB SSD controller: Double up the capacity of the previous-gen for portable SSDs

Advanced storage solutions for AI in automotive / IoT edge applications

SM2264XT-AT Automotive-grade SSD Controller: 30% less CPU power-consuming than PCIe Gen4 SSD without SR-IOV.
FerriSSD PCIe Gen 4 NVMe single-chip BGA SSD
Ferri-eMMC 5.0/5.1
Ferri-UFS 2.2/3.1