Tuesday, January 4th 2022
Phison Unveils E26, the Company's First PCIe Gen5 Controller for High-end Desktop Gaming
Phison Electronics Corp., a global leader in NAND flash controller integrated circuits and storage solutions, will showcase its lineup of next-generation gaming solutions for customers, partners, media and other interested parties during CES 2022, January 5-8 exclusively by private virtual demos. The new-class of solutions include the company's first PCIe Gen5 controller for high-end desktop gaming, a future high-performance Gen4 solution, and demonstration of the next-generation game workload coming soon to PCs.
Phison, the leader in gaming-optimized SSDs pushes the boundaries of performance. The company's solutions power seamless experiences for modern console, desktop/notebook and mobile gaming, which are delivered to consumers through an extensive and diverse group of partners.
Update Jan 4th: Added presentation slides, product images and closeups of the PCB designs.
Highlighted gaming products Phison will preview on the virtual demos include:
PS5026-E26 - Phison's First PCIe Gen5 SSD Architecture
The E26 SSD solution is the best-in-class combination of performance and low-power using Phison's unique architecture. E26 is a customizable SSD platform designed for PCIe Gen5 that will span enterprise and consumer markets. The company's first Gen5 controller will ship in multiple form factors and features with the ability to scale beyond 10 GB/s while meeting power requirements for all-day computing. Phison will show the E26 for the first time at CES 2022.
PS5021-E21T - Phison's New High-Performance PCIe Gen4 DRAM-less Solution
The E21T demonstration will show Phison's new DRAM-less architecture as the future leader in next-generation mobile gaming. The E21T, the successor to the E19T, and E21T BGA, the successor to the E13T, break throughput performance barriers using the Gen4 interface to sets new standards in the user experience.
PS5013-E13T - Phison's BGA for Mobile Gaming
Xiaomi chose Phison's E13T BGA SSD and its superior performance and efficiency for the Black Shark 4 gaming phone series. Xiaomi credits the E13T BGA for delivering a 69 percent increase in read and write performance showing that NVMe redefines mobile gaming. Phison will show the Xiaomi Black Shark 4 during CES 2022 in a first-person Zoom demonstration.
Below you'll find the full presentation deck that Phison was planning to show during their in-person CES briefings.
The "Next Generation Gaming Workload" is an interesting slide. It shows a synthetic test scenario that mimics what Phison expects we'll be seeing with Microsoft's DirectStorage (they were careful to not use that name). Games are expected to stream in large amounts of data from storage, continuously, while you play the game. They tested their own controller against other major competitors and found that these exhibit some spiking over the course of a multi-hour test, which could manifest in stuttering. At this time I'm not 100% convinced, we'll see if this will actually have any effect on the gameplay experience—not much is finalized yet at this stage of development.
Phison, the leader in gaming-optimized SSDs pushes the boundaries of performance. The company's solutions power seamless experiences for modern console, desktop/notebook and mobile gaming, which are delivered to consumers through an extensive and diverse group of partners.
Highlighted gaming products Phison will preview on the virtual demos include:
PS5026-E26 - Phison's First PCIe Gen5 SSD Architecture
The E26 SSD solution is the best-in-class combination of performance and low-power using Phison's unique architecture. E26 is a customizable SSD platform designed for PCIe Gen5 that will span enterprise and consumer markets. The company's first Gen5 controller will ship in multiple form factors and features with the ability to scale beyond 10 GB/s while meeting power requirements for all-day computing. Phison will show the E26 for the first time at CES 2022.
The E21T demonstration will show Phison's new DRAM-less architecture as the future leader in next-generation mobile gaming. The E21T, the successor to the E19T, and E21T BGA, the successor to the E13T, break throughput performance barriers using the Gen4 interface to sets new standards in the user experience.
Xiaomi chose Phison's E13T BGA SSD and its superior performance and efficiency for the Black Shark 4 gaming phone series. Xiaomi credits the E13T BGA for delivering a 69 percent increase in read and write performance showing that NVMe redefines mobile gaming. Phison will show the Xiaomi Black Shark 4 during CES 2022 in a first-person Zoom demonstration.
The "Next Generation Gaming Workload" is an interesting slide. It shows a synthetic test scenario that mimics what Phison expects we'll be seeing with Microsoft's DirectStorage (they were careful to not use that name). Games are expected to stream in large amounts of data from storage, continuously, while you play the game. They tested their own controller against other major competitors and found that these exhibit some spiking over the course of a multi-hour test, which could manifest in stuttering. At this time I'm not 100% convinced, we'll see if this will actually have any effect on the gameplay experience—not much is finalized yet at this stage of development.
35 Comments on Phison Unveils E26, the Company's First PCIe Gen5 Controller for High-end Desktop Gaming
With higher speed NAND and lithography shrinks you also need new controller technology that can manage the error correction required. SSDs are very complex at the controller level.
Look at any SSD review and you'll find that certain tests give really slow results still - the biggest changes we see are when flash and/or controllers improve, allowing those results to change.
Raw read and write speed are the main improvement with new PCI-E generations, not important results like 4K random read and write
www.techspot.com/review/2116-storage-speed-game-loading/
No one is disputing better overall performance of incoming PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives and no one is disputing some better loading times for games. That is true. However, gains for games are negligible, in the same way as adding more cores than 6-8 does not scale up with frames per second boyond that point. Hardware has become more capable than game engines.
This is how the market looks like for PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives in 2022. I am afraid it will largely not exist on client gaming platforms until mid 2023 the earliest, if not later:
- no support whatsoever on new 2022 laptops - both AMD 6000 and Intel 12th gen platforms announced today come with PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots only - so, no one will buy any new PCIe 5.0 drive
- on desktops, only a few high-mid and high tier Z690 support PCIe 5.0 on GPU slots - bifurcation is necessary and another spending is needed on super-expensive PCIe 5.0 NVMe adapter
www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/msi-gen-5-nvme-card-adapter-for-z690-alder-lake
- Seagate FireCuda 520 1TB (PCIe 3.0) - €150, Seagate FireCuda 530 1TB (PCIe 4.0) - €200, Seagate FireCuda 540 1TB (PCIe 5.0) - €300? - another €100 for 2-3 second gain in 2023?
- CPUs will not natively support PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives until the next gen, at least
PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives are coming into client market too early and they are going to be too expensive for promised gains. Simple as that.
any takers?
SK hynix has shown that they can produce NVMe SSD controllers that are both performant and power-efficient with the Gold P31 (granted it's only PCIe 3.0); are you guys going to do the same? Or are you just going to go the Intel route and throw efficiency out of the window in pursuit of raw speed and headlines about it - speed that is going to be wholly irrelevant to the vast majority of users?
It's not really fair to compared E18 with Gen4 to a Gen3 drive from a competitor. That drive was supposed to be a Gen4 product but they made an error in the lithography that couldn't be changed in software to fix it. Oops! So they essentially used the latest in lithography to make a previous generation product. If we wanted to go backwards and make an amazing Gen2 or Gen3 SSD using the latest in materials offered today we could, but what fun would that be?
Running the industry standard test for battery life (BAPCo MobileMark), E18 is one of the top performers for Gen4 SSDs available today. In a notebook with a factory battery time of 5.5 hours, the very best time scored, and the E18, are within 20 minutes of each other.
In client market, "tremendous" marketing value is currently zero and there is no profit to be made for at least two years. It's a pie in the sky at the moment.
There is no "niche" and nothing to capture in client market, as no single desktop or mobile platform support M.2 PCIe 5.0 slots. Perhaps next year if CPUs get x4 PCIe 5.0 support, in addition to x16 for GPUs.
Currently, the only way to install NVMe PCIe 5.0 drive on desktop is through expensive PCIe 5.0 adapter on expensive Z690 board with two PCIe 5.0 slots and run it in x8 mode, alongside GPU in x8 mode. This is far away from being a "niche". Literally a handful of enthusiastic users with a lot of money to spend would ever do this this year. And, of course, a few youtubers will show us how this works. That's it.
That is the reality of PCIe 5.0 this year.I have E13T controller at home in one of my NVMe drives in NAS for caching. It's rock solid.