Looking back we will see that Pison has been very active in the expansion of SSDs under PCIe 4.0 thanks, among other things, to its E16 controller, which is controversial as it works well. However, performance should continue to grow until the theoretical limit of the display IM.2 NVMe new PCIe 4.0 x4, where it is possible that we will soon have it.
Pison E18, will you govern 8 GB / s?
It seems that the limit we are talking about is much closer than we first thought. And it is that although PCIe 4.0 doubles its performance on each line compared to PCIe 3.0, SSDs are willing to measure their performance as far as they like.
The new Phison E18 controller is the best proof of this, with the company showing the first performance data for other units built and developed, and CrystalDiskMark speaks for itself:
If you look at the sequence of data and consecutive writing under Q16T1, this Phison E18 controller performs the beat of Read 7381.21 MB / s and consecutive writing of 7025.86 MB / s, which shows an increase in performance between 5% and 6% compared to data provided by SSDs such as Rocket 4 Plus.
The latest 7 GB / s from less than two months ago will soon be forgotten, because as we see Pison and his E18 obviously have everything ready to sell the controller to companies like Corsair and face Samsung.
Closer to the PCIe 4.0 x4 theory limit
Considering that each PCIe 4.0 router gets a speed of 1969 MB / s, the theoretical limit of the M.2 interface interface under 4 PCIe routes is 7876 MB / s. This means that we are less than 500 MB / s in reaching this limit and that due to bus requirements in terms of synchronization and verification, it is likely to barely exceed 7.5 GB / s.
This means that Phison achieves the best performance of this bus and the type with SSDs that will launch in 2021 under its E18 and where the development will focus on other categories such as Q1T1 and the like.
However, no official dates or SSD models have confirmed the use of this new controller, so with the current dates it is very likely that they will be launched at CES 2021 and sold out a few months later. .
At this speed there is a good chance that once the speed limit is reached, the producers will put their efforts into new controls in PCIe 5.0, where both Intel and AMD are already more advanced to install it on their platforms. It is therefore possible that PCIe 4.0 is quite short, as is the case with DDR2 on PC.
