Why it matters: Silicon Motion is looking to greenbacks in on the huge need for fast storage in the enterprise space, then it's scrambling to be among the commencement companies to launch a PCIe five.0 SSD controller. And while that may not mean much for consumers today, it signals that significantly faster SSDs might arrive a chip sooner than expected.

PCIe 4.0 has brought little operation improvement on the graphics card cease, as we've shown through our testing using the GeForce RTX 3080 Iron. However, it did pb to a new crop of NVMe solid land drives that offer incredibly fast read and write speeds, while some models like the Samsung 980 Pro can striking a blistering seven,000 MB per second.

On the eve of PCIe 4.0's arrival in 2022, the Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) announced PCIe v.0 and PCIe vi.0 specs, which looked like a peculiar decision. On the other paw, enterprise and industrial requirements are evolving and so fast that these standards will no doubtfulness coexist to serve a variety of applications.

Silicon Motion PCIe iv.0 controllers support read speeds of up to 7,400 MB/due south

Silicon Motion recently said that it would start sampling a new enterprise SSD controller that uses the PCIe 5.0 interface as soon as the second half of this year. The visitor plans to introduce server SSDs based on the new controller next twelvemonth, which means consumer-grade PCIe 5.0 SSDs are potentially too in the pipeline.

Consumer PCIe iv.0 SSDs are plenty fast for most applications, simply they're quickly saturating the theoretical maximum of 8 GB per 2d that a 4-lane connection can beget. PCIe 5.0 can effectively double that bandwidth, which is going to benefit machine learning and big data applications more than than gaming or video editing, though Microsoft'southward DirectStorage API might modify that in the about time to come.

Kioxia (formerly Toshiba Memory) is besides working on enterprise-grade PCIe 5.0 SSDs based on its CM6 platform, and is already aircraft engineering samples to its customers. At any rate, the soonest we might utilize a PCIe 5.0 SSD in a normal PC is whenever Intel will be able to send its Alder Lake CPUs, which could be equally soon equally this yr or early on 2022.

Prototype credit: The SSD Review