Where are all the PCIe 5.0 SSDs? Despite AMD and leading controller chip maker Phison indicating drives matching AMD’s Gen 5 capable Ryzen 7000 series CPUs will be available in November. I doubt it, given that we haven’t seen a faster Gen 5 M.2 model anywhere. (opens in new tab)With no news about the drive, it seems unlikely we’ll see Gen 5 storage this year.
As a leading third-party supplier of controller chips to the SSD industry, Phison has the authority on SSD technology. Its controller chips are by far the most popular choice among vendors who don’t have the enormous technological clout required to tap their own chips. Phison unveiled his E26 controller with 5th generation support in May, Recently as October showed (opens in new tab) We expect Gen 5 drives to launch this year “once AMD’s AM5 platform and Ryzen 7000 series CPUs hit the market”.
It’s been about a month since the Ryzen 7000 chips launched here, and there hasn’t been a single Gen 5 drive available. This includes big companies like Samsung and Micron that have the resources to create their own controller chips. None of these brands have announced Gen 5 drives yet.
Of course, Intel’s Alder Lake and Raptor Lake platforms also support PCIe Gen 5. However, unlike AMD’s latest desktop platforms, Intel doesn’t offer a dedicated quad-link PCIe Gen 5 interface on the CPU socket for storage.
Alternatively, to enable Gen 5 storage on Intel platforms, the 16-lane graphics link is split in two for PCIe Gen 5 drives connected via add-in cards instead of motherboard M.2 slots. We need to free up 8 lanes.
Anyway, the broader question is whether Gen 5 SSDs really offer much of a benefit. On paper, Gen 5 doubles the theoretical bandwidth to 16GB/s in both directions for quad-link drives. In practice, the fastest Gen 4 drives reach around 7.3GB/s due to I/O overhead. So even though early Gen 5 SSDs are under 15GB/sec, one might realistically expect just under 15GB/sec for Gen 5 drives. It is unlikely that you will get the most out of the new protocol.
Furthermore, 4K random access and IOPS throughput is arguably not the peak sequential performance of existing SSDs that need the most improvement. Current high-end Gen 4 drives tend to exceed about 300MB/s in these measurements, which is nowhere near the maximum bandwidth of a Gen 4 interface. there is no difference. Instead, the main need is an improvement in flash memory technology, but his IOPS performance of the controller chip is also clearly important.
Either way, we don’t expect the first PCIe Gen 5 drives to significantly improve 4K random access performance. So launch delays are probably not that important.
