FADU is a South Korean startup that has just surprised the world by launching its Flash FC5161 controller for PCI Express 5.0 interfaces and its NVMe SSDs which they have dubbed the Echo. What is special about them? Well, they want to revolutionize the NVMe SSD market thanks to their controller Flash FC5161 and the so-called Echo storage units, let’s see what is special about them.
FADU FC5161, the fastest Flash controller
The flash controller is the most important piece when it comes to the performance of an NVMe SSD and we can say that the FADU FC5161 it is an impressive piece of hardware in this regard. The target market for these units is cloud computing, as they are compatible with the standard OCP NVMe Cloud 2.0 and the NVMe FADU Echo SSD will be sold in various way factors such as E1.S, E1.L, E3 and U.2.
And what about the performance figures of the FADU FC5161? Starting with their sequential speeds we have rates of 14.6 GB / s for writing and 10.4 GB / s for reading. If we talk about random access performance we are in 3.4 million IOPS in reads and 735,000 in writes. All this under a consumption below 5.2 W, something to highlight given that in each generation the consumption of the PCI Express interface increases.
Its release date? His plan is to deploy them by the end of 2022, but his target market would not be home PCs but the business market for artificial intelligence and cloud computing applications.
The interesting thing about your proposal
FADU’s proposal with its FC5161 controller is to simplify the process of moving from virtual to physical addresses to access the contents of the NAND Flash storage on NVMe SSDs. How do they intend to do it? Well, with the use of a RISC-V core and a series of accelerators in order to provide the necessary quality of service and thereby unloading part of the tasks that are typical in the CPU or GPU that access the NVMe SSD to the controller.
These changes are key to reducing the energy consumption of this type of storage units, since it is important in data centers and servers that are capable of offering a continuous transfer rate, which can be affected by the high temperatures caused by the high energy consumption. Being therefore one of the key points the quality of service.
We will see how FADU is doing, in any case this also highlights the emergence of hardware solutions based on RISC-V for the development of solutions by small companies to face specific problems.
