After Phison and Silicon Motion, Realtek is also launching into PCI Express Gen 5 SSD controllers

The future of M.2 PCIe Gen 5 SSDs involves increased competition in the controller market: Realtek wants its piece of the pie.

The more, the merrier, says the proverb. In the case of controllers for PCI Express Gen 5 SSDs, we would rather say “the more the merrier, the more attractive the prices become”.

While Phison was alone in this sector, competitors are expected to multiply as the SSD market gradually turns towards this new generation.

Competition is organized

At the end of 2021, Intel launched its Alder Lake architecture, and with it, the American firm took the plunge towards supporting PCI Express 5.0, known as 5^e generation.

Intel then continued with the Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh generations, while we had to wait for the Ryzen 7000 and the AM5 platform at the end of 2022 to see AMD turn to the new PCIe Gen 5. It must be said that the peripherals with the new standard did not rush, rather proving AMD right.

We will not talk about graphics cards here, but if the PCIe Gen 5 standard did not immediately “contaminate” SSDs, it is both because of the already very good performance of PCIe Gen 4 models and because of the additional cost caused by the new generation of SSDs. One reason for this: the lack of competition.

A high-end controller from Realtek

As we said in the preamble, for many months, only Phison had a controller, the famous PS5026-E26, a PCIe Gen 5 controller to offer. In fact, all SSD manufacturers had to go through Phison, which, of course, was not conducive to lower prices.

At Computex 2024 in Taipei, however, other manufacturers confirmed that they were in the running, and after Silicon Motion or Mediatek, it is Realtek’s turn to present a first PCIe Gen 5 chip. The RTS5782 was unveiled by the firm, which however did not give a precise timetable.

One thing is certain, however, Realtek does not seem to want to make up the numbers and is putting forward high-end specifications with the management of 8 NAND channels, flash memory up to 3,600 MT/s and a DRAM cache, using your choice of DDR4, LPDDR3, LPDDR4 or LPDDR4x.

Not to spoil anything, Realtek offers speeds of up to 14 GB/s in sequential reading and up to 12 GB/s in writing, while random seems more particularly considered, with up to 2,500 kIOPS as well in reading than writing. The majority of current PCIe Gen 5 SSDs are below that.

It remains to be seen what the price of the RTS5782 and its release window will be. Realtek is particularly evasive, and it’s a safe bet that its competitors will not sit idly by.

Source : Tom’s Hardware