A novelty that is unlikely to arrive before 2030: time enough to find a use for it?
Along with Phison, Silicon Motion is one of the most prominent designers of SSD controllers. Its products have been widely adopted on the PCI Express Gen 3 generation of SSDs, but the brand has been less reactive than its competitor on PCI Express Gen 4 and, even more recently, on PCI Express Gen 5. Silicon Motion therefore seems intent on taking the lead for the next generation. Thus, at Flash Memory World 2025, the brand presented details of its first SSD controller compatible with the PCI Express Gen 6 standard, which has certainly been validated, but is not expected to be deployed industrially for some time yet.
Silicon Motion
Flash Memory World 2025 was held in Nanjing, China, on July 9. The event provided an opportunity to take stock of the latest flash memory technologies, and it was only natural that Silicon Motion should once again showcase its MonTitan SM8466. The controller had already been mentioned several times, but this is the first time Silicon Motion has gone into such detail. We learn, for example, that the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is responsible for producing the chip via its 4 nm node, making the MonTitan SM8466 the most finely etched SSD controller to date.
Silicon Motion also refers to the use of the NVMe 2.0+ protocol, which, combined with the speeds authorized by PCI Express Gen 6, enables new records to be set. The brand is talking about 28 GB/s sequential, which is almost double the speed of the best PCI Express Gen 5 SSDs currently available. Silicon Motion is able to make even greater progress in random access, where we're now talking about 7,000,000 IOPS when the best PCI Express Gen 5 products don't exceed 3,000,000 IOPS. That said, this presentation shouldn't lead us to believe that PCI Express Gen 6 is just around the corner: Silicon Motion's president speaks of an arrival, at best, by 2030. Having said that, while there will obviously be uses for such technologies, they won't be of interest to the average person: we're already struggling to exploit PCI Express Gen 4, so Gen 5 and, a fortiori, Gen 6, you think well...
