A few weeks ago, we covered the Silicon Motion MonTitan PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD Platform and SM8366 Controller Launch but all we had was slideware. At FMS 2022, we were able to see the controller with NAND attached at the show. This is Silicon Motion’s PCIe Gen5 platform designed for data center SSDs so it is something we are looking forward to in the future.
Silicon Motion MonTitan SM8366 PCIe Gen5 Controller at FMS 2022
At FMS 2022, the company had its MonTitan SSD platform on display. The big feature was perhaps the Silicon Motion SM8366 PCIe Gen5 controller that is designed for up to 14GB/s of sequential performance.
Here are the full specs we found from the initial release as a refresher.
What was really interesting at the show is that the company showed off the controller in U.2, E3.S and E1.S form factors and with three different types of NAND with Kioxia TLC and Micron QLC and TLC NAND.
With the MonTitan platform, Silicon Motion is trying to get vendors to build drives based on its controller. Silicon Motion does not make NAND, so it is important that the company qualifies its controller with different types of NAND. In the hyper-scale market, it is not uncommon for customers to require different NAND to be validated. In the enterprise market, that may manifest in different drive models sold with a common controller and firmware base.
Final Words
We still have a few months until the launch of mainstream AMD and Intel PCIe Gen5 platforms. There will also be developments such as CXL block storage devices coming soon. In the meantime, we expect PCIe Gen5 SSDs to become commonplace. The SM8366 with either single PCIe Gen5 x4 or x2/x2 dual port is flexible for many different scenarios even as those x2 links offer speeds in-line with today’s Gen4 x4 links.
Hopefully, we will see the SM8366 in drives soon on STH.
