There is no doubt that we are in the decade of the SSD, the technological developments that will take place in the years to come will result in the massive adoption of this storage format, the main advantage of which lies in the speed of access, both in access latency and in bandwidth. In the latter case, thanks to the use of PCI Express interfaces, the fifth generation of which is fast approaching.
Marvel Bravera SC5: NVMe bajo PCIe 5.0 SSD
Under its Bravera brand, Marvell presented a few days ago its new product line SC5, which consists of a series of NVMe M.2 SSD units, but with a peculiarity that differentiates them from the rest of the units launched so far. now on the market because they conform to version 5.0 of the PCI Express standard.
This means that they have a transfer speed which can reach up to 14 Gb / s between flash controller and PCI Express system interface. Double the 7 Gb / s of NVMe SSDs under PCI Express 4.0. Specifically, they will do this with two versions of their memory controller. The 8-channel MV-SS1331 and the 16-channel MV-SS1333. Remember that channels are the number of NAND Flash chips installed in the SSD with which the flash controller interacts.
As for the PC, we know that if Intel will rely on full PCI Express 5.0, AMD will not do so for the moment with the chipsets that will accompany the AM5 socket, even if it is too early to tell and AMD may take a move back.
Challenges for PCIe 5 adoption in SSDs
The main issue with PCIe 5.0 is heat and power consumption, moving from PCI Express 4.0 to 5.0 means doubling the bandwidth without increasing the number of pins for full backward compatibility, which means a considerable increase in energy consumption
Another benefit that we might see in next-gen SSDs will be the adoption of hardware systems for compressing and decompressing data in real time, but with the ability to operate with several gigabytes per second of bandwidth. We have seen this measure on consoles before and it requires modifications to the next generation processors. By doing this, NVMe SSDs practically gain more storage capacity, but it consumes a lot of CPU power.
Anyway, we are talking about tens of times the bandwidth of a SATA SSD and therefore a considerable increase in performance. Also, let’s not forget that all NVMe PCI 5.0 SSDs will be compatible with previous PCIe generations.