SM2508 Now Out as Silicon Motion Announces Best Performance SSD Controller at FMS 2024

Silicon Motion Technology Corporation, a global leader in designing and marketing NAND flash controllers for solid-state storage devices, has announced SM2508, the best power efficiency PCIe Gen5 NVMe 2.0 client SSD controller for Artificial Intelligence (AI) PCs and gaming consoles. It is the world’s first 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, the SM2508 delivers 1.7x better power efficiency than PCIe Gen4 SSDs and up to 70% better than current competitive PCIe Gen5 offerings on the market. Silicon Motion showcased its SM2508-based SSD design and other innovations at the Future of Memory and Storage.

SM2508: All about Superior Performance for AI

Silicon Motion’s SM2508 is a superior-performance, low-power PCIe Gen5 x4 NVMe 2.0 SSD controller designed for AI-capable PC notebooks. It supports eight NAND channels with up to 3,600 MT/s per channel, delivering sequential performance speeds of up to 14.5 GB/s and 13.6 GB/s and random performance speeds of up to 2.5M IOPS, providing up to 2x higher performance than PCIe Gen4 products.

The SM2508 maximises PCIe Gen5 performance with an impressive power consumption of approximately 3W. It features Silicon Motion’s proprietary 8th-generation 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-generation 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, Senior VP of Client & Automotive Storage Business at 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.”

The SM2508 specifications 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 four PCIe lanes of 32Gb/s data transfer speed
• Up to 14.5GB/s and 13.6GB/s sequential performance and up to 5MIOPS 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 Q4 of this year.

Besides the SM2508, the Silicon Motion exhibit also included:

MonTitan™ PCIe Gen5 Enterprise SSD Development Platform for AI Storage Workloads

• SM8366:14 GB/s sequential and 5 M IOPS random SSD performance, supporting capacities beyond 128TB with 16 channels providing up to 2400MT/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

• SM27560 controller : 65% more power-efficient than previous-generation UFS 3.1.
• SM2322USB SSD controller: Double up the capacity of the previous-generation for portable SSDs

Advanced Storage Solutions for AI in Automotive / IoT Edge Applications

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

Silicon Motion representatives also presented at FMS forums. For further information, please visit: https://www.siliconmotion.com/events/2024FMS/.