Silicon Motion SM2508 PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe SSD Controller Set for Mass Production

Silicon Motion has been teasing their SM2508 client SSD controller for more than a year now at various trade shows. The controller is finally set for mass production, just in time as the mainstream segment of the Gen 5 SSD market is poised to take off. Silicon Motion expects SSDs based on the SM2508 to be available for purchase by the end of the year.

At FMS 2024, the company was reusing the same information cards seen at Computex in June. The specifications of the SM2508 from our Computex coverage are reproduced here.

Silicon Motion NVMe Client SSD Controller Comparison
	SM2508	SM2264	SM2268XT2	SM2269XT
Market Segment	High-End		Mainstream
Manufacturing Process	6nm	12nm	12nm	12nm
CPU Cores	4x Cortex R8	4x Cortex R8	2x Cortex R8	2x Cortex R8
Error Correction	4K+ LDPC	4K LDPC	4K+ LDPC	4K LDPC
DRAM	DDR4, LPDDR4X	DDR4, LPDDR4X	No	No
Host Interface	PCIe 5.0 x4	PCIe 4.0 x4	PCIe 4.0 x4	PCIe 4.0 x4
NVMe Version	NVMe 2.0	NVMe 1.4	NVMe 2.0	NVMe 1.4
NAND Channels, Interface Speed	8 ch, 3600 MT/s	8 ch, 1600 MT/s	4 ch, 3600 MT/s	4 ch, 1600 MT/s
Sequential Read	14.5 GB/s	7.5 GB/s	7.4 GB/s	5.1 GB/s
Sequential Write	14 GB/s	7 GB/s	6.7 GB/s	4.8 GB/s
4KB Random Read IOPS	2500k	1300k	1200k	900k
4KB Random Write IOPS	2500k	1200k	1200k	900k

Current Gen 5 SSDs in the consumer client market are currently all based on Phison's E26 controller. The appearance of newer platform solutions for SSD vendors is bound to be good from both an end-user pricing and adoption perspective.