Silicon Motion has been teasing their SM2508 client SSD controller for more than a year now at various trade shows. The controller is finally set for mass production, just in time as the mainstream segment of the Gen 5 SSD market is poised to take off. Silicon Motion expects SSDs based on the SM2508 to be available for purchase by the end of the year.
At FMS 2024, the company was reusing the same information cards seen at Computex in June. The specifications of the SM2508 from our Computex coverage are reproduced here.
Silicon Motion NVMe Client SSD Controller Comparison
SM2508
SM2264
SM2268XT2
SM2269XT
Market Segment
High-End
Mainstream
Manufacturing Process
6nm
12nm
12nm
12nm
CPU Cores
4x Cortex R8
4x Cortex R8
2x Cortex R8
2x Cortex R8
Error Correction
4K+ LDPC
4K LDPC
4K+ LDPC
4K LDPC
DRAM
DDR4, LPDDR4X
DDR4, LPDDR4X
No
No
Host Interface
PCIe 5.0 x4
PCIe 4.0 x4
PCIe 4.0 x4
PCIe 4.0 x4
NVMe Version
NVMe 2.0
NVMe 1.4
NVMe 2.0
NVMe 1.4
NAND Channels, Interface Speed
8 ch,
3600 MT/s
8 ch,
1600 MT/s
4 ch,
3600 MT/s
4 ch,
1600 MT/s
Sequential Read
14.5 GB/s
7.5 GB/s
7.4 GB/s
5.1 GB/s
Sequential Write
14 GB/s
7 GB/s
6.7 GB/s
4.8 GB/s
4KB Random Read IOPS
2500k
1300k
1200k
900k
4KB Random Write IOPS
2500k
1200k
1200k
900k
Current Gen 5 SSDs in the consumer client market are currently all based on Phison’s E26 controller. The appearance of newer platform solutions for SSD vendors is bound to be good from both an end-user pricing and adoption perspective.
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