Kioxia talks PCIe Gen5 SSDs at CFMS
At China Flash Memory Summit, the world’s second-largest manufacturer of flash memory products, Kioxia, revealed first details on its PCIe Gen5 prototype SSD.
The company revealed that a prototype of their enterprise SSD offers 14 GB/s sequential read speed and 7 GB/s of write speed, which is a 103% and 67% increase over its own PCIe Gen4 CM6 device. At the same time, the company reports that the prototype offers 79% higher I/O performance in random read and 77%/50% lower latency in read and write operations. Those are the first results of the next-generation PCIe Gen5 SSD.
Kioxia PCIe Gen5 SSD Prototype, Source: WeChat
Kioxia will be launching its 2.5″ EDSFF E3S form factor SSD in the near future, possibly by the end of this year. The device will still need to go through the evaluation process by server vendors. The company expects market adoption of Gen5 SSDs to happen in 2022. It will be offered in capacities from 1.6TB up to 30TB. They should launch as CD7 series.
There is still no news on consumers’ Gen5 SSD solutions though, despite Intel Alder Lake-S launching in less than 2 months. The CPU series is the first desktop platform to support the new interface. There is still no news on Gen5 GPUs, thus SSDs might be the first Gen5 devices for the new platform.
There likely won’t be any Gen5 graphics cards until the NVIDIA Lovelace/Hopper and AMD RDNA3 series, both expected by the end of next year.
