In its quarterly report, Phison, a Taiwanese company, has presented a list of new controllers for SSD drives to the public. These are PS5020-E20, PS5025-E25 and PS5026-E26. Some of them use the PCIe 4.0 interface, while others rely on the more powerful PCIe 5.0.
The new products will be presented on the AMD or Intel platform before the end of the year. The PCIe 5.0 interface has a maximum bandwidth of up to 13 GB/s. This considerably increases the data bandwidth over SSD, thus significantly improving the performance of the devices.
Controllers with PCIe 5.0 bus will only be used in premium segment products at the start of sales. More affordable solutions will not be launched before 2023. Phison is planning to hold the niche of available devices thanks to more affordable models with PCIe 4.0 and the stated advantage of supporting an external RAM array.
In addition to Phison, Samsung, Silicon Motion, and Koixia are developing controllers based on the new interface. Therefore, it remains to be seen how the claimed devices will prove themselves in real use.