Thanks To AMD's Ryzen 3000 Series Announcements, Phison Could Win Big

AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su kicked-off the Computex International Press Conference this week with the company’s very first keynote address at the massive event. During her talk, Dr. Su revealed a number of exciting details regarding AMD’s upcoming second-generation EPYC processors (codenamed Rome), third-generation Ryzen 3000 series processors, Navi-based Radeon RX 5700 series GPUs, and the X570 chipset.

The CPUs and GPUs Dr. Su announced got the lion’s share of attention in the resulting aftermath of her keynote, and while AMD’s upcoming silicon creations are sure to re-shape their respective competitive landscapes when they arrive in July, it’s a market AMD doesn’t play in that may transform the most – solid state storage.

You see, all of AMD’s upcoming products are PCI Express 4.0 enabled. Today’s common computing platforms all feature PCI Express 3.0 support. The PCI Express 4.0 specification, however, double the available bandwidth per PCIe lane. PCIe 4.0 offers a transfer rate of 16GT/s with flexible lane width configurations, versus 8GT/s for PCIe 3.0. That translates to a theoretical peak of 64GB/s of bi-directional bandwidth over an x16 link, which is what a typical graphics card would use today. And that was most of the context of Dr. Su’s talk; since she was revealing a new GPU architecture, how PCIe 4.0 would / could affect graphics performance was a feature of the keynote address.

Doubling PCIe bandwidth per lane, however, also means that PCIe-based solid state drives will benefit, provided they feature a PCIe 4.0-enabled controller with enough performance to take advantage of the additional resources. And that’s just what Phison has announced. The upcoming Phison PS5016-E16 SSD controller revealed at Computex will be at the heart of a number of new NVMe SSDs boasting sequential read transfer rates of 5GB/s, and writes of up to 4.4GB/s.

K.S. Pua, Chairman and CEO of PHISON, said “Working with AMD has enabled rapid innovation and expansion of the PCIe 4.0 ecosystem. The PS5016-E16 is the world’s first Gen4x4 NVMe SSD controller IC. When combined with AMD X570 motherboards, this storage solution is ready to meet the high bandwidth requirement of 8K HD gaming.”

Today’s fastest PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSDs can hit about 3.5GB/s (reads) and 2.8GB/s (writes). The first wave of Phison PS5016-E16-based drives ups those numbers significantly, however, and will likely improve latency characteristics as well, due to the inherent benefits of the faster PCIe links and internal pathways in the new controller.

A number of companies have already shown off drives based on the PS5016-E16, including Corsair, Gigabyte, and Patriot. Pricing and availability dates weren’t disclosed yet, but drives will likely launch shortly after AMD’s new CPUs and chipset arrive in July.