TECH TALK
PCIe 5.0 SSDs Are Finally Here
THE PCI EXPRESS 5.0 specification was finalized on May 29, 2019. The first PCIe 5.0-ready consumer platform arrived with Intel’s Z690 chipset and socket LGA1700 platform in November 2021. (IBM’s Power10 processor was announced in 2020 and started shipping in mid-2021.) But PCIe 5.0 graphics cards and SSDs were nowhere to be found.
Jarred Walton
In fact, outside of certain Nvidia data center H100 solutions, PCIe 5.0 GPUs are still not here, but after waiting for over a year, the SSDs are starting to trickle out. The first crop of PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs all use Phison’s E26 controller. That’s an interesting point to begin with, as Phison at one point was regarded as one of the slower SSD controller options. That has changed a lot over the past several years, and the E26 now reigns as the fastest solution we’ve tested. It uses a dual ARM Cortex-R5 design with triple-core CoXProcessors—the coprocessors handle some common tasks, so the R5 isn’t a limiting factor, even though Cortex-R8 controllers are now shipping.