Phison has announced an all-new PCIe 4.0 SSD controller capable of ultra-fast read/write speeds in excess of 7GB/s. This is near the upper limit of the speeds PCIe 4.0 can deliver, at a time when PCIe 4.0 has only just been introduced to the mainstream market with AMD Ryzen.

The new PS5018-E18 controller (E18 for short) has a read performance of up to 7.4 GB/s and write performance of 7 GB/s. It is an 8-channel controller capable of operating with up to 8TB worth of NAND flash, requiring drives that can maximize each channel for peak performance. The controller itself is manufactured on the TSMC 12nm process.

Phison first announced a compatible controller for AMD's Ryzen 3000 CPUs in July 2019, the first processor and motherboard combination to support the PCIe 4.0 platform. [The E16 controller announced at the time was 5GB/s read and 4.4GB/s write, a bit modest by today's standards, but still much faster than the fastest PCIe 3.0 drives. But still much faster than the fastest PCIe 3.0 drives. Still, the company has since teased that it will introduce an even higher-performance PCIe 4.0 controller at E18.

Now Phison has a bit more competition in the form of Samsung's 980 Pro, the WD Black SN850, and three new PCIe 4.0 controllers from Silicon Motion.

All of these have come out just in time for the release of not one, but two PCIe 4.0-enabled CPUs; AMD's Ryzen 5000 series chips were released last week and will be available progressively through the end of the year, and Intel's upcoming Rocket Lake processors will It has already confirmed that it will support the wider bandwidth of the PCIe 4.0 standard; PCIe 4.0 will be supported during the first three months of 2021. [You can read our thoughts on the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and the Zen 3 architecture as a whole in Alan's review. [because switching from PCIe 3.0 to PCIe 4.0 is not a huge improvement for the average PC gamer.

At least, not yet; the difference between the fastest SSD and the fastest SSD in a game is measured in seconds, or even tenths of a second, as the GPU memory buffer plays a crucial role in actually keeping the graphics card fed with the data it needs. However, developers are already seeing the benefits of solid state storage, especially fast PCIe 4.0 drives, and such drives have been introduced in PCs, most recently in the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.

The goal is to eliminate CPU bottlenecks with the help of technologies like DirectStorage. This will allow developers to utilize the GPU and storage more effectively, while at the same time avoiding overloading the CPU. The ultimate goal is a more expansive and detailed game world. Quite admirable, if you ask me. [Perhaps in the future we will find a good reason to include ultra-fast PCIe 4.0 drives.

Besides gaming, PCIe 4.0 drives are great for people who frequently move large numbers of files around in their PCs or need a fast scratch drive for large creative projects.