Phison's new PCIe 5.0 chip ushers in the new age of super fast SSD storage

(Image credit: Phison)

A new SSD standard is coming, and it's going to be lightning fast. Helping usher us into the new age of super fast SSDs, Phison just came out with an announcement that its first PCIe 5.0 customised SSD controller is in the works, and should be in mass production by 2022.

The news (via BenchLife) puts more weight into the notion that PCIe 5.0 is expected to arrive next year some time—as long as supply chain issues don't have too much of a negative impact—though we were hoping for the new standard to hit around the same time as Intel's upcoming Alder Lake CPUs.

Either way, with Phison grinding away at these upcoming controllers, and Kioxia's recent PCIe 5.0 prototype teasing us with 14,000MB/s sequential read and 7,000MB/s sequential write speeds, we're staring down yet more nails in the coffin for our current best PCIe 4.0 SSDs.

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SATA, NVMe M.2, and PCIe SSDs on blue background — (Image credit: Future)

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Phison's new controller, named PS5026-E26, will retain a 12nm semiconductor process, and combines ARM R5 processor and CoXProcessor 2.0 architecture. It will be compatible with M.2, U.3, E1.S, and E3.S products, among others, so next-gen motherboards are edging ever closer to our grasp.

There's still a little while to wait before the tech trickles down to consumers, but we may be totally wiped out by the time it gets to us, anyway—with companies like Samsung looking to copy the human mind onto an SSD, just imagine how much faster PCIe 5.0 SSDs will make the process.

Hello, Transcendence.

Having been obsessed with game mechanics, computers and graphics for three decades, Katie took Game Art and Design up to Masters level at uni and has been writing about digital games, tabletop games and gaming technology for over five years since. She can be found facilitating board game design workshops and optimising everything in her path.