SSD speeds are about to go into hyperspace, thanks to Phison’s new E26 controller

Phison, a Taiwanese company that solely focuses on storage technologies, revealed a new E26 memory controller made for new NVMe SSDs. From the available information, the new tech will push SSDs into the PCIe 5.0 realm, with much higher speeds than we have ever imagined.

The test used a reference 1TB SSD using Micron’s NAND memory. The controller is built for speed, using the DirectStorage API from Microsoft. This is done through two ARM Cortex R5 cores and three CoXProcessor 2.0 accelerators, all built using TSMC’s 12nm technology.

With all the specs out of the way, let’s talk speed, as this new controller allowed the SSD to reach read speeds of more than 12GB per second. This is complemented by Write speeds of 10GB per second, which would be unheard of before. These tests were performed using the CrystalDiskMark benchmark. You can transfer whole movie files, games, and video projects in seconds, which will greatly improve the workflow and the rate of how fast things get done. When compared to some of the fastest PCIe Gen 4.0 SSDs, we see improvements of up to 70%. Keep in mind that this also isn’t a final product, as with further firmware and design tweaks, these speeds could be improved.

What is startling about the new SSD is that it has a different  M.2 2580 form factor, which is larger than the well-adopted M.2 2280 standard and more importantly, lacks backward compatibility. This will most likely be ironed out, in order to fit current motherboard design patterns and standards, as a lot of boards come with two or more M.2 slots.

We can expect new PCIe 5.0 SSDs to hit the market this fall, synced with AMD’s 600-series chipsets for the new AM5 platform, which is moving to a Land Grid Array, for better or worse.

Until then, you can check out the latest laptops equipped with the AMD Ryzen 7 6800H:

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