Demo: Phison E26 with Micron 232-layer NAND on Ryzen 7000

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At the Flash Memory Summit 2022, the SSD controller manufacturer Phison took the opportunity to demonstrate the performance of its E26 controller with PCI Express 5.0. Other innovations were used in the test system with a Ryzen 7000 processor and the Micron 232 layer 3D NAND.

One ​​thing first: the performance demo itself around 10 GB/s in sequential reads and writes according to a CrystalDiskMark screenshot is unimpressive. Phison was already able to show more than 12 GB/s during a demo at the end of May; the chip should even reach 13.5 GB/s at its peak.

Demo system with Ryzen 7000 and E26 SSD (Image: Future (via Tom's Hardware))

A Ryzen 7000 in “the wild”

What is interesting, however, is what is going on around it, because as Tom's Hardware reports, the system was equipped with a CPU from AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7000 series. The processor with the new Zen 4 architecture should have 6 cores and 12 threads and be identified as 100-000000593-20_Y. The engineering sample that appeared in a controversial CPU benchmark database a few days ago has the same ID. It is obvious that this is a pre-production chip of the expected Ryzen 5 7600X.

Micron's 232-layer NAND requires fine tuning

The third novelty in the group is the 3D NAND used on the SSD prototype: Micron's new 232-layer 3D NAND is to be used here, which has only recently been mass-produced. Since this is supposed to work even faster than the 176-layer NAND from the same manufacturer, the result of the demo is surprisingly weak. However, Phison explained that this combination still needs to be tested and optimized. In addition, a cooler is required for the highest performance, which was missing in the “naked” demo SSD in M.2 2280 format.

The PCIe 5.0 SSD era is scheduled to start in September

September will see the first consumer PCIe 5.0 SSDs with Phison E26 parallel to AMD's new desktop platform appear. AMD had already promised solutions from various manufacturers, which at the same time provide arguments for switching to the new AM5 platform with PCIe 5.0.

AMD provides the platform for new NVMe SSDs with PCIe 5.0