ASUS today announced a new generation of AMD-based motherboards to accompany the ROG Crosshair X670E Extreme and support the latest Ryzen 7000 processors: the ROG Crosshair X670E Hero, the ROG Strix X670E-E Gaming WiFi, and the TUF Gaming X670E-Plus WiFi. Introducing the new generation of AMD ROG motherboards: the X670E series. Featuring support for DDR5 memory modules and PCIe 5.0 devices, the ROG Crosshair X670E Hero, ROG Strix X670E-E Gaming WiFi, and TUF Gaming X670E-Plus WiFi is equipped with improved bandwidth capabilities, stability, and overall connectivity.

All three boards feature the latest ASUS Q-Design innovations. The ROG Crosshair X670E Hero and ROG Strix X670E-E Gaming WiFi includes the PCIe Q-Release button, a feature that lets users release their graphics card from the PCIe slot with one press. In addition, all three featured motherboards will include the single-sided Q-DIMM latching design to ensure ease of installation and allowing memory sticks to hold firmly in place. Lastly, the boards include the M.2 Q-latch, allowing users to secure or loosen an M.2 drive with just their fingertips.

GIGABYTE Technology, one of the top global manufacturers of motherboards, graphics cards, and hardware solutions, announces today the latest AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD with 10 GB/s read speed. Enhanced by the new generation PCIe 5.0 controller with ultra-fast 3D-TLC NAND Flash, AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD provides boosted performance of more than 55% over PCIe 4.0 SSDs and comes in 1 TB to 4 TB capacity variants using an M.2 2280 interface to deliver easy installation and superb capability. Additionally, the separate SSD and heatsink offers more flexibility in system build and thermal options for users. GIGABYTE's exclusive SSD Tool Box application provides users real-time status of SSD to leverage performance, thermal, stability and capability.

"With PCIe 5.0 support on new motherboard platform, the bandwidth and transfer performance are raised to the next level. As the first manufacturer to have both motherboards and SSD product lines in the market, GIGABYTE is also the first to unveil the AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD. This new product brings blistering fast storage performance with ultra durability and compatibility to users for optimal quality and performance." said Jackson Hsu, Director of the GIGABYTE Channel Solutions Product Development Division.

Corsair decided it was time to start teasing its upcoming MP700 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD, although the company didn't bother providing any images of the drive itself, or any specifications in the teaser. However, Corsair did provide some sequential performance figures, which end up being impressive and disappointing at the same time. The MP700 is said to offer sequential read speeds of up to 10 GB/s or 10,000 MB/s if you prefer and sequential write speeds of 9.5 GB/s. These are obviously very fast speeds, but quite far from what the PCIe 5.0 can deliver and the performance figures are only a bit faster than the best PCIe 4.0 drives. It's likely that we'll see better performance from second generation controllers, just as we did with PCIe 4.0 SSDs, as this gives both the SSD controller makers and the SSD makers a chance to refresh their products a year or two down the line.

Today, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) announced "together we advance_PCs," a livestream premiere to unveil next generation AMD PC products. Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su, CTO and EVP Mark Papermaster, and other AMD executives will present details on the latest "Zen 4" architecture that powers upcoming AMD Ryzen processors and the all new AM5 platform built around the latest technologies including DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, all designed to drive a new era of performance desktop PCs.

The show will premiere at 7 p.m. ET on Monday, August 29, on the AMD YouTube channel. A replay can be accessed a few hours after the conclusion of the event at AMD.com/Ryzen.

A bit late to the game compared to its competitors, MSI has finally published its product pages for three of its upcoming X670 and X670E motherboards. The three models are the MEG X670E ACE, the MPG X670E Carbon WiFi and the Pro X670-P WiFi. Earlier todaywe got a first hint with regards to the pricing of a couple of these boards and now we have most of the technical details with regards to the boards themselves. As with all other boardmakers, MSI hasn't revealed any information with regards to memory clocks and obviously no details about which CPUs will be supported. We already had a pretty good idea what to expect from these boards based on the details MSI released at Computex, but features like the power design weren't revealed at the time, nor did we get a very good look at the board.

The MEG X670E ACE appears to be MSI's high-end board for those that aren't interested in spending a small fortune on the Godlike board and it should cater to just about all needs. The board has a 22+2+1 phase power design and MSI is using a heatpipe as well as a stacked fin-array heatsink and a MOSFET backplate to help cool the oversized power circuitry. Other features include 10 Gbps Ethernet, although there is only one Ethernet interface, a DisplayPort 1.4 compatible USB-C 10 Gbps port (which was said to be DP 2.0 compliant at Computex), as well as two 20 Gbps USB-C ports around the back. USB4 is nowhere to be seen, but is most likely related to ASMedia being late to the game with its host controller. MSI has gone for a design where the x16 PCIe 5.0 lanes from the CPU are split between the first two PCIe x16 slots and the third slot is using four lanes of PCIe 5.0 from the CPU. The final four PCIe 5.0 lanes from the CPU are for one of the M.2 NVMe slots and the board has a further three M.2 PCIe 4.0 slots. On top of that, MSI also includes an M.2 Xpander-Z Gen5 Dual add-in card that can accept a further two PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD at the cost of eight PCIe lanes from the GPU.

The upcoming Samsung 990 PRO flagship consumer SSD has recently been listed as PCIe 5.0 compliant by PCI-SIG with the entry also confirming the drive's name and M.2 interface. The upgrade to PCIe 5.0 from 4.0 doubles the available bandwidth for the card with Samsung's existing enterprise PCIe 5.0 drives reaching speeds of 13,000 MB/s significantly above the 7000 MB/s of the best PCIe 4.0 drives. The latest Intel Alder Lake systems can support PCIe 5.0 drives on select motherboards with AMD support set to arrive with the launch of Ryzen 7000 and X670/B650 motherboards. Samsung is expected to release at least 1 TB and 2 TB variants of the drive however other details such as the exact length of the card and the controller used are currently unknown.

MSI welcomes the MEG Ai1300P PCIE5 power supply unit, the world's first power supply unit to be fully ready for ATX 3.0 and PCIe 5.0. With graphics cards becoming all the more important, users must know what components to buy for their system if they are looking to upgrade. To understand why the MEG Ai1300P PCIE5 is the ultimate future-proof power supply unit, let's begin with understanding ATX 3.0.

ATX 3.0 is Intel's new specification standard for existing PSUs. In short, ATX 3.0's main purpose is to help provide more reliability, and better power efficiency and provide graphics cards up to 600 watts of power. ATX 3.0 is created in response to graphics cards' increase in performance and the ever-increasing need for power. ATX 3.0 puts heavy emphasis on power excursions to make sure high-performance graphics cards can be sustained and your system can remain stable. Thanks to ATX 3.0 there is now an increase in efficiency while idling and a new power connector is added to help achieve all the above. ATX 3.0 added a new PCIe 5.0 12VHPWR connector that features 12+4 pins instead of the traditional 6 or 8. With the new PCIe 5.0 connector, the power supply and cable can supply up to 600 watts of power.

Earlier this week, some details, including the PCB layout of the MSI MEG X670E Godlike leaked, but now MSI has shared some additional details, including a picture of the board. In fact, MSI shared most of thespecs of the Godlike board during Computex, but the company didn't release a picture back then. However, now we know the power design, which consists of 24+2 phases and a 105 A power stage. MSI has also created its own screwless M.2 slots, as well as heatsinks, which simply clip in place after the SSD has been installed, although it doesn't appear the Godlike board has screwless heatsinks for more than one of M.2 drives.

Other features include 10 and 2.5 Gbps Ethernet, as well as AMD's RZ616 WiFi 6E module. MSI hasn't gone for USB4 from what we know and nothing was mentioned with regards to USB4 during the MSI presentation. MSI also seems to have skipped video outputs on this board, but it's possible that one of the USB-C ports will support display output, even though that wasn't the case back at Computex. As with many other X670E boards, the Godlike supports 60 W USB PD charging via the front USB-C port.

During AMD's Meet the Experts event, ASUS revealed more details about its ROG Crosshair X670E Extreme, a board the company revealed during Computex, but didn't show the rear I/O of. However, ASUS also unveiled the ROG Crosshair X670E Hero, a board the company hadn't shown off prior to the AMD event. Both boards will feature a pair of USB4 ports, with both ports supporting DisplayPort Alt Mode. Both boards feature a further two USB-C ports, plus seven plus USB-A ports. The Extreme features 10 Gbps and 2.5 Gbps Ethernet, whereas the Hero gets to make do with 2.5 Gbps Ethernet, although it gains an HDMI output. Both boards have a full set of audio jacks and WiFi 6E support, as well as a rear mounted clear CMOS and BIOS FlashBack button.

Taking a closer look at the Hero board, it has two PCIe x16 PCIe slots, plus a single, open-ended PCIe x1 slot. The board supports four M.2 NVMe slots for SSDs and comes with a PCIe 5.0 card for a fifth drive. It also has what appears to be six SATA ports, a front header for a 20 Gbps USB 3.2 2x2 USB-C port that also supports up to 60 W USB PD and Qualcomm Quick Charge 4+. The Hero board will be kitted out with an 18 phase power design, with the Extreme getting a 22 phase design, both with a 110 Ampere power stage. ASUS has moved its audio solution to the ALC4082 USB based audio codec and at least the Extreme will have an ESS ES9218 audio codec. ASUS is also bringing over the Q-Release solution for graphics cards to these boards, as well as the Q-Latch for M.2 SSDs.

According to TrendForce, DRAM market demand bit growth will only amount to 8.3% in 2023, sub-10% for the first time in history, and far lower than supply-side bit growth of approximately 14.1%. Data indicates the DRAM market to be severely oversupplied at least in 2023 and prices may continue to decline. NAND Flash is still in a state of oversupply and, although prices are expected to fall in the first half of next year, NAND Flash has built-in price elasticity compared to DRAM and average prices are expected to stimulate density growth in the enterprise SSD market after declining for several consecutive quarters. Demand bits are expected to grow by 28.9%, while supply bits will grow by approximately 32.1%.

From the perspective of various applications, rising inflation continues to impact demand in consumer markets, so the primary goal of memory brands has been to prioritize inventory correction. Especially in the past two years, a shortage of upstream components caused by the pandemic led memory brands to overbook purchase orders while sluggish sales on the distribution channel side have resulted in slow depletion of current notebook inventory, resulting in a further weakening of notebook demand in 2023. In terms of PC DRAM, the proportion of DDR4 and LPDDR4X in PC applications will fall further while the penetration rate of LPDDR5 and DDR5 continues to rise. However, the price premium of DDR5 will limit the growth of density in PCs. DRAM density in PCs is estimate to increase by approximately 7% annually in 2023. If manufactures cut DDR5 pricing more aggressively next year, installed capacity may be driven up to 9%, depending on whether DDR5 price concessions can be effectively reconciled with DDR4.

During this year's Flash Memory Summit, Phison, a company known for SSD controllers and now flash drives, demonstrated a system running AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors based on Zen 4 architecture. What is interesting about the shown specification is that the system was running an engineering sample of an upcoming Zen 4-based CPU with the latest storage technologies at impressive speeds. Using a Phison PS5026-E26 SSD controller, also called E26, the PCIe 5.0 SSD is powered by Micron's latest 232-layer TLC NAND flash. This new NAND technology will also bring greater densities to the market by promising higher endurance, higher read/write speeds, and better efficiency.

With AMD's upcoming AM5 platform, support for PCIe 5.0 SSDs is a welcome addition. And we today have some preliminary tests that show just how fast these SSDs can run. In CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4, it achieved over 10 GB/s in both read and write. We know that the E26 controller is capable of 12 GB/s speeds, so more fine-tuning is needed. Being an early sample, we expect final specifications to be better. The system is powered by an engineering sample of a six-core, twelve-threaded Zen 4 CPU running at unknown clocks, codenamed 100-000000593-20_Y. We can expect to see more of this technology once AMD's AM5 platform lands and Phison-powered SSDs hit the shelves in September.

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today unveiled an array of next-generation memory and storage technologies during Flash Memory Summit 2022, held at the Santa Clara (California) Convention Center, Aug. 2-4. In a keynote titled "Memory Innovations Navigating the Big Data Era," Samsung spotlighted four areas of technological advancement driving the big data market—data movement, data storage, data processing and data management—and revealed its leading-edge memory solutions addressing each field.

To maximize data center efficiency in an increasingly data-driven world, Samsung introduced a next-generation storage technology, "Petabyte Storage." The new solution will allow a single server unit to pack more than one petabyte of storage, enabling server manufacturers to sharply increase their storage capacity within the same floor space with a minimal number of servers. High server utilization will also help to lower power consumption.

BittWare, a Molex company, a leading supplier of enterprise-class accelerators for edge and cloud-computing applications, today introduced new card and server-level solutions featuring Intel Agilex FPGAs. The new BittWare IA-860m helps customers alleviate memory-bound application workloads by leveraging up to 32 GB of HBM2E in-package memory and 16-lanes of PCIe 5.0 (with CXL upgrade option). BittWare also added new Intel Agilex I-Series FPGA-based products with the introduction of the IA-440i and IA-640i accelerators, which support high-performance interfaces, including 400G Ethernet and PCIe 5.0 (CXL option). These newest models complement BittWare's existing lineup of Intel Agilex F-Series products to comprise one of the broadest portfolios of Intel Agilex FPGA-based offerings on the market. This announcement reinforces BittWare's commitment to addressing ever-increasing demands of high-performance compute, storage, network and sensor processing applications.

"BittWare is excited to apply Intel's advanced technology to solve increasingly difficult application problems, quickly and at low risk," said Craig Petrie, vice president, Sales and Marketing of BittWare. "Our longstanding collaboration with Intel, expertise with the latest development tools, including OneAPI, as well as alignment with Molex's global supply chain and manufacturing capabilities enable BittWare to reduce development time by 12-to-18 months while ensuring smooth transitions from proof-of-concept to volume product deployment."

In a couple of days, AMD will be co-hosting its Meet the Experts event with several Taiwanese motherboard makers, which are said to be showing off their upcoming X670/X670E motherboards during the event. However, courtesy of multiple sources, we already have a preview of MSI's upcoming MEG X670E Godlike motherboard. MSI itself has posted a teaser on bilibili in the PRC, which shows off the four M.2 slots the board will have, of which three supports the new-ish, slightly wider 25 mm M.2 form factor, compared to the more common 22 mm width for M.2 drives. Note that MSI writes that all four M.2 slots are PCIe 5.0, but it appears that only one of the slots is actually PCIe 5.0, with the other three being PCIe 4.0. Courtesy of Wccftech, we also have the PCB layout and Videocardz got their hands on most of the specs for the board.

The PCB layout was also annotated by @harukaze5719 to make it easier to see what some of the parts are. The board will apparently have a 24+2+1 power phase layout. It also has two additional power inputs via standard 6-pin PCIe type connectors, one for USB-PD and one that provides extra power for the PCIe slots. The board has a total of three PCIe 5.0 slots, with the first two slots sharing bandwidth and the third slot being a x4 slot that is also connected to the CPU. The board will also have eight SATA ports, two internal USB-C ports, as well as a rear one and a pair of modules around the back of which at least one should be WiFi. The board also has two Ethernet ports, one 10 Gbps and one 2.5 Gbps, at least five USB-A ports, nine fan/pump headers, a POST80 debug LED display and space for some overclocking friendly features. The 24-pin ATX power connector appears to be right-angled. Expect this to be a very premium product price wise, most likely well north of US$800.

SK hynix has developed its first DDR5 DRAM-based CXL (Compute Express Link) memory samples and strengthened its presence in next-generation memory solutions market. The form factor of the sample is EDSFF (Enterprise & Data Center Standard Form Factor) E3.S and it supports PCIe 5.0 x8 Lane, uses DDR5 standard DRAM and is equipped with CXL controllers. CXL, which is based on PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), is a new standardized interface that helps increase the efficiency of utilizing CPUs, GPUs, accelerators, and memory. SK hynix has participated in the CXL consortium from an early stage, and is looking to secure CXL memory market leadership.

The essential point of the CXL memory market is expandability. The CXL memory allows for flexible memory expansion compared to current server market, where the memory capacity and performance are fixed once the server platform is adopted. CXL also has high growth potential as it is an interface spotlighted for high performance computing systems such as AI and big data related applications.

Silicon Motion Technology Corporation ("Silicon Motion"), a global leader in designing and marketing NAND flash controllers and solid-state storage devices today announces MonTitan, a PCIe Gen5 SSD solution platform perfectly suited for the most challenging Datacenter and Enterprise applications. Silicon Motion's new MonTitan platform features an entirely new, purpose-built ASIC and FW architecture, optimized for performance and QoS. Its unique Layered FW stack enables the development of customer differentiated solutions with a high degree of flexibility and accelerated time to market, all while reducing engineering cost.

"SSD storage solutions are evolving to address new challenges in data centers which demand changes in storage platforms and operating models," said Nelson Duann, Silicon Motion's Senior Vice President of Marketing and R&D. "Our MonTitan SSD solution is an innovative PCIe Gen5 SSD platform designed to satisfy the unique demands of datacenters today while providing flexibility and programmability to meet future evolving standards."

Courtesy of Planet 3DNow! we now have an idea when AMD might be launching the Ryzen 7000-series of CPU's, as the site posted about an upcoming AMD event called Meet the Experts on Twitter. The event registration page reads "Supporting the recent launch of AMD Ryzen 7000 Series processors," which suggests that the new Ryzen 7000-series is likely to launch on or before the 4th of August. The event takes place at 11:00 in the morning, CDT (Central Daylight Time) or 16:00 UTC.

The event will showcase motherboards from AMD's partners and representatives from ASRock, ASUS, Biostar, Gigabyte and MSI will be attending the online event. There's still no mention of the B650E chipset, but apparently X670E and X670 products will be shown, but not even B650 at this point. Based on the short summary blurb, we're also likely to see a PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD being shown off. AMD will obviously have a separate launch event for the Ryzen 7000-series, but if that will take place on the same day, or on a different date, is unknown at this point.

KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced that its CM7 Series enterprise NVMe SSDs are now shipping to select customers. Optimized for the needs of high-performance, highly efficient servers and storage, the CM7 family is designed with PCIe 5.0 technology in Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E3.S and 2.5-inch form factors

Having introduced the industry's first EDSFF drives designed with PCIe 5.0 technology last year, the addition of the CM7 family expands KIOXIA's leadership position and allows OEM customers to deliver best-in-class performance to end users: The CM7 Series nearly saturates the PCIe 5.0 interface at 14 gigabytes/s read throughput.

Slowly but surely, we're getting more and more details about upcoming AM5 motherboards and ASRock has put up a very spec light page for its upcoming X670E Pro RS motherboard. Not much has changed since the Computex reveal, but the product page did contain a couple of extra board shots as well as a look at the rear I/O. This time around the M.2 WiFi card slot is also populated, suggesting that there will be a WiFi version of this model shipping. The board has a single "Blazing" M.2 slot for a PCIe 5.0 SSD as well as what should be three PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots, of which two come with a shared heatsink and one has no heatsink at all. The final M.2 slot is limited to PCIe 3.0. As this is an X670E board, the PCIe x16 slot is of course PCIe 5.0.

Other features include Realtek's Dragon branded 2.5 Gbps Ethernet controller that has some gaming specific software. It appears that ASRock has trimmed the audio jacks to a bare minimum, with only a line out, a mic in and an optical S/PDIF being connected to the Realtek ALC897 audio codec. The board also has a single USB-C port around the back, although it's at least a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 port (20 Gbps). There are a total of five USB-A 3.2 ports, of which one is capable of 10 Gbps speeds, with the other delivering 5 Gbps. There are also four USB 2.0 ports, a DP and HDMI port, as well as a UEFI/BIOS update button around the back. Other expansion options include an internal USB-C header and two PCIe x1 slots of unknown type, as well as six SATA ports and two USB 3.x type headers. This should be one of the more affordable X670E motherboards when the AM5 platform launches later this year.

It would appear that we're slowly getting closer to the launch of AMD's AM5 platform, as ASRock just put up its first X670E motherboard on its website. The page still has very limited information and there's only a single picture of the motherboard, which is the same one that the company shared at Computex. However, we now get a few more details with regards to what to expect in terms of additional features. For starters, ASRock has gone for a 26-phase SPS Dr.MOS power design, which should be plenty even for the most avid overclocker. The board has a pair of PCIe 5.0 x16 slots that operate in dual x8 mode when both slots are used. In addition to this there are four M.2 slots, where ASRock has decided to call the CPU connected slot for Blazing, as it's PCIe 5.0, whereas the three PCIe 4.0 slots are using the Hyper name the company has used so far.

The board also has eight SATA ports, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, which apparently are USB4 certified as well and a header for a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbps) case mounted port. Furthermore the board has five rear USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) USB-A ports around the back, plus three USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) ports and a further four via headers, as well as a single HDMI port of unknown version. ASRock has gone for an Intel Killer E3100G 2.5 Gbps Ethernet controller and an Intel Killer AX1675X WiFi 6E and Bluetooth card, with the combo having Killer DoubleShot Pro support. Finally audio is via a Realtek ALC4082 USB connected audio codec and an ESS Sabre 9218 DAC. Overall this looks like a pretty kitted out board without too much excessive bling and will hopefully be priced accordingly.

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CDNS) today announced that its PHY and Controller IP for the PCI Express (PCIe ) 5.0 specification in the TSMC N7, N6 and N5 process technologies have passed certification tests from PCI-SIG at the industry's first event for PCIe 5.0 specification compliance held in April. The Cadence solutions were tested to their full potential and complied with the full speed of 32GT/s for PCIe 5.0 technology. The compliance program provides designers with testing procedures to assess that the PCIe 5.0 interfaces on their system-on-chip (SoC) designs will operate as expected.

The Cadence IP for PCIe 5.0 technology consists of a PHY, companion controller and Verification IP (VIP) targeted at SoC designs for very high-bandwidth hyperscale computing, networking and storage applications. With Cadence's PHY and Controller Subsystem for PCIe 5.0 architecture, customers can design extremely power-efficient SoCs while accelerating time to market.

Intel is preparing to launch its 13th generation of desktop processors codenamed Raptor Lake. Succeeding Alder Lake, the 13th gen design will implement up to eight P-cores with 16 E-cores manufactured on Intel's improved 7+ technology node. Today, we got a performance preview from SiSoftware that has collected SiSoftware Sandra database scores of Intel Core i9-13900 Raptor Lake-S processor. They present an overview of a few benchmarks. Firstly, the SoC features 36 MB of unified L3 cache versus 30 MB in Alder Lake. With DDR5 memory running up to 5600 MT/s and PCIe 5.0, the SoC features the latest IO and memory standards. The big P-cores now lack AVX-512 and feature 2 MB of L2 cache per core. We see 4 MB of L2 cache for a cluster of small E-cores. An exciting addition to E-cores is the AVX/AVX2 support, which is a first for Atom cores.

Regarding testing, the author has collected a few tests that seemed appropriate to compare to the equivalent Alder Lake model. Starting with ALU/FPU tests that benchmark basic arithmetic tasks, Raptor Lake delivered 33% to 50% improvement over Alder Lake. The Raptor Lake design achieved this with 3.7 GHz P-Core and 2.76 GHz E-Core frequency. In vectorized and SIMD tests, the 13th gen design showed only 5% to 8% improvement over the previous generation. For more benchmarks and accurate results, we have to wait for TechPowerUp's test, which will be coming on the release day.

There has been a fair bit of confusion about AMD's upcoming AM5 platform when it comes to connectivity and we're going to break things down and explain what the difference is between the B650 and X670 boards. We're also going to cover the processor connectivity, since that's an integral part of any motherboard these days. All the information in this article is based on what we've been told by various sources during Computex.

Phison has showcased the expected performance of its upcoming PS5026-E26 controller, built to usher NVMe SSDs into the PCIe 5.0 realm. The company showcased its new controller's prowess by building a reference SSD design based on 1 TB of Micron's TLC NAND. Phison's new controller has been built from the ground-up to accelerate next-generation SSD workloads - including direct access technologies based on Microsoft's DirectStorage API, accelerated by two ARM Cortex-R5 cores and three proprietary CoXProcessor 2.0 accelerators built on TSMC's 12 nm process.

Phison's internal testing shows its reference SSD achieving sequential read speeds of over 12 GB/s in CrystalDiskMark, with sequential writes going as high as 10 GB/s - a 70% performance increase compared to the world's fastest PCIe 4.0 SSDs, which currently top out at around 7 GB/s sequential speeds. As to 4K performance, one of the most tangible metrics for user experience, random reads are set at around 16.000 IOPS, showcasing room for improvement with further firmware optimizations for actual shipping products.

According to TrendForce research, North American data centers saw an improvement in components supply after February, driving a recovery in purchase order volume. As Server brands returned to normal in-office work following the pandemic, the increase in capital expenditures on related information equipment has also boosted order growth. The addition of Kioxia's raw material contamination incident led to an increase in the pricing of certain rush orders, pushing up overall Enterprise SSD revenue in 1Q22 to US$5.58 billion, or 14.1% growth QoQ.

According to TrendForce, Samsung and SK hynix (including Solidigm) were the top two players in 1Q22. At the beginning of the year, demand from hyperscale data centers resulted in high inventory levels due to component mismatches, leading Samsung's order growth missing expectations. However, as repercussions from the WDC and Kioxia contamination incident hit NAND Flash production capacity in 1Q22, server customers quickly turned to Samsung for additional orders, driving the company's 1Q22 revenue to US$2.77 billion, up 14.8% QoQ.