During Computex, Phison and AMD announced an agreement with the goal of bringing NVMe SSDs with PCI Express 5.0 interface to market. The first has created a PCIe Gen 5 compliant flash controller. The pHison PS5026-E26. Well, we finally know what its performance is and, therefore, what we can expect from NVMe SSDs that integrate it as the main chip.
There is no doubt that AMD wants to be the first to offer the possibility of using a PCI Express 5 NVMe SSD as storage. A feature that has been promised in all the chipsets presented for its future Ryzen 700. Thus, the X670 Extreme, B650 and X670 chipsets will have the ability to interact with these future storage units. The first to take advantage of this has been Phison, which has developed a flash controller, the Phison E26, which allows you to take advantage of the high speed of fifth generation PCI Express. Which can exceed 10 GB / s transfer speed.
This is how the Phison PS5026-E26 flash controller for NVMe PCIe 5.0 SSD performs
At the moment this type of storage units are not available on the market. Using an interface that is twice as fast means that the processor and other components increase the number of requests they can make to the SSD. This is where the power of the flash controller matters and can make all the difference. Well, Phison itself has put its PS5026-E26 to the test on a makeshift drive based on Micron’s 3D TCL chips via CrystalDiskMark.
The performance obtained? because through the sequential reading and writing test SEQ1M (Q16T1) the result obtained has been the following:
- 12,457 MB/s in reading.
- 10,023 MB/s in writing.
These being the highest speeds that the Phison microcontroller can achieve. Obviously, it will not be the only one that we will see on the market and we still have to wait for the one from the different brands, although it has been the first to appear on the market. In any case, it does not take advantage of 100% of the bandwidth provided by PCIe Gen 5 and does not double the performance of the previous generation.
At the moment only for computers with AMD Ryzen 7000
In any case, solid state drives with this transfer speed can only be used in computers with a Ryzen 7000 processor. Let’s not forget that the Intel Core 12 does not support these speeds for storage and only for the graphics card. We do not know if Intel has made any changes to Raptor Lake in the form of adding more lanes to support this storage class out of the box.
In any case, we cannot forget that there is an agreement between Phison and AMD in this regard. This is noted by the fact that so far we have only seen a single unit of this nature being announced. With the rest of the manufacturers waiting to make their move. Possibly, waiting for Intel to make its move and that the bulk of computers with the capacity to have a solid state drive of this type is higher.
