Phison clarifies its partnership with MSI and AMD, preparing for the arrival on the market of the first PCI 5.0 SSDs with which the AM5 platform will be compatible.
With AMD and Micron, Phison announces the launch of a cooperation cell to set up a common ecosystem around PCIe 5.0, a new evolution of the protocol aimed at further improving the performance of SSD storage media (which will undoubtedly also be used by future graphics cards). In fact, AMD and Micron will use Phison’s first PCIe 5.0 controller, the PS5026-E26, which remains compatible with the M.2 format (despite its limitations in terms of power consumption), but promises a performance increase of almost 100%.
“The E26 controller allows gamers to compete at the highest level and helps content creators optimize overall system performance to increase productivity”boasts Leo Huang, director of product and marketing at Phison.
The ecosystem mentioned includes not only this PCIe 5.0 controller, but also AMD’s AM5 platform and Micron’s DDR5 memory, not to mention Crucial’s 3D Nand chips (brand owned by Micron) for SSDs. It is the combination of all these elements that should accelerate the transition to next-generation SSDs compatible with PCIe 5.0. It should be noted that AMD’s AM5 platform, which will be one of the gateways to PCIe 5.0 for the general public, has just been presented and that the main motherboard manufacturers have announced models with AM5 socket (Asrock, Asus, Biostar, Gigabyte and MSI).
The Phison E26 had already been talked about at the CES in Las Vegas at the very beginning of the year. Taking advantage of announcements related to the Intel Alder Lake platform (12th Gen), also PCIe 5.0 compatible, Phison announced a controller capable of reaching speeds of up to 12 GB / s in reading and 11 GB / s in writing. There is also talk – on paper – of a maximum of 1.5 million random read IOPS on 4K files, and 2 million write IOPS under the same conditions. Engraved in 12 nm by TSMC, this controller is based on two ARM Cortex-R5 cores. It remains to be seen when the first PCIe 5.0 SSDs will be marketed and what gains they will achieve in practice.