KIOXIA demos Silicon Motion SM8366 PCIe 5.0 SSD controller with 13.6 GB/s read speeds and 3.4 million random IOPS

PCie 5.0 SSDs are slowly gaining traction for the mass consumer market, and the fastest we have seen in action up until now boast around 12 GB/s sequential reads thanks to Phison’s latest controllers. There are, however, even faster controllers with more than 13 GB/s read speeds, like the Silicon Motion SM8366 recently unveiled at the 2022 OCP Global Summit.

Integrating 16 NAND channels with 2400 MT/s bandwidth, the new SM8366 PCIe 5.0 controller can reach sequential read / write speeds of up to 14 GB/s and an impressive 3 million random IOPS. KIOXIA demoed the latest SM controller at the OCP event and read speeds topped at around 13.6 GB/s. while the random 4K throughput reached 3.4 million IOPS, slightly higher than the Silicon Motion estimates.

KIOXIA also announced that the SM8633 controllers will power some of its upcoming datacenter NVMe 2.0 SSDs with up to 128 TB capacities, but no availability or pricing info was provided. It looks like the E1.S form-factor closest to the desktop M.2 PC NVME SSDs still features a rather bulky heat sink, so the SM PCIe 5.0 controllers are probably heating up quite a bit, just like the Phison ones.

By the time these solutions become affordable for PC users, we should also see quite a few games and programs that take advantage of the PCIe 5.0 speeds through Microsoft’s DirectStorage API.

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Bogdan Solca – Senior Tech Writer – 1856 articles published on Notebookcheck since 2017

I first stepped into the wondrous IT&C world when I was around seven years old. I was instantly fascinated by computerized graphics, whether they were from games or 3D applications like 3D Max. I’m also an avid reader of science fiction, an astrophysics aficionado, and a crypto geek. I started writing PC-related articles for Softpedia and a few blogs back in 2006. I joined the Notebookcheck team in the summer of 2017 and am currently a senior tech writer mostly covering processor, GPU, and laptop news.