Silicon Motion has unveiled its next-gen PCIe Gen6 SSD controller, which will be used to power the high-end enterprise-level storage products.
Silicon Motion's MonTitan SM8466 PCIe Gen6 SSD Controller Is Coming To The Enterprise Segment, Consumer-Level SSDs Are Still Far
Silicon Motion (SMI) had hinted that it was already working on PCIe Gen6 SSD controllers earlier this year, and now, the company has unveiled its first official product. As expected, PCIe Gen6 controllers will first come to the enterprise/datacenter segment, rather than the consumer market. We shouldn't expect any PCIe 6.0 SSD news on the consumer end till at least the end of this decade. Even Gen5 SSDs are yet to be the mainstream success that many hoped for.
So, coming to the specifications, the SM8466 would be part of the MonTitan series, which is specifically designed for Enterprise-tier storage products. The controller will be based on the TSMC 4nm process node, support SCA interface, and deliver capacities of up to 512 TB, a major increase over the SM8366 controller.
The highlights of the Silicon Motion SM8466 PCIe Gen6 SSD controller include compliance with the new NVMe 2.0+ interface and the new OCP NVME SSD Spec 2.5. The controller will feature SR-IOV / MPF, Namespaces, SMART monitoring, End-To-End Data protection, Secure Boot, AES-256, TCG Opal, and Attestation support.
As for the speeds, the Silicon Motion MonTitan SM8466 PCIe Gen6 SSD controller will offer speeds of up to 28 GB/s, a doubling over the 14 GB/s of existing PCIe Gen5 SSDs. It will also drive up to 7 million IOPS. So now, we have a baseline to compare against the previous generation:
SM8466 Gen6 vs SM8366 Gen5 Controller Specs:
- 4nm vs 12nm
- 512 TB vs 128 TB
- 28 GB/s vs 14.2 GB/s
- 7.0M IOPS vs 3.5M IOPS
At FMS 2025, Silicon Motion is only detailing the specifications for its MonTitan SM8466 PCIe Gen6 SSD controller. The actual products won't be available until a few years, most probably by the 2026-2027 time frame when next-gen data centers enter the market. Once again, the consumer-level stuff isn't coming before 2030, and even the CEO of Silicon Motion, Wallace C. Kuo, has stated such. Besides that, Micron, SK Hynix, and other manufacturers are already working on Gen6 solutions, so expect an update from them soon too.
News Source: ITHome
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