Silicon Motion MonTitan Gen5 SM8366 Controller Performance Revealed

Silicon Motion previously announced their MonTitan PCIe Gen5 platform (with the SM8366 SSD controller) back in July, a new high-performance, user-programmable platform designed for demanding data center and enterprise SSD solutions. It’s based on the OCP Data Center NVMe SSD and NVMe 2.0 specifications. Now, during a live demo at the 2022 Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit this past week, Silicon Motion has revealed that it attained new performance milestones.

Silicon Motion previously announced their MonTitan PCIe Gen5 platform (with the SM8366 SSD controller) back in July, a new high-performance, user-programmable platform designed for demanding data center and enterprise SSD solutions. It’s based on the OCP Data Center NVMe SSD and NVMe 2.0 specifications. Now, during a live demo at the 2022 Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit this past week, Silicon Motion has revealed that it attained new performance milestones.

In a demo shown below, SiliconMotion was showing off the SM8366 running a 4K random read profile.

The screenshot below shows a fio loadgen applying a 16-thread and 16-queue workload to the SSD, with it ultimately showing 13.6GB/s and over 3.4 million IOPS read performance. This is about double what we see from current Gen4 SSDs in the market.

So, what exactly is this new Gen5 platform? It’s purpose-built with ASIC and FW architecture and supports user SSD application optimization in both NVMe and Host Based FTL usage models to address data placement in next-gen NAND. The new PCIe Gen5 platform will be available in several platforms: E1.S, E1.L E3.x, and U.2/3. Silicon Motion can also support a variety of available NAND types.

The SM8366 features enterprise-level security and features without having to sacrifice performance and QoS, as it leverages Silicon Motion’s PerformaShape and NANDCommand technologies. In addition, Silicon Motion will be providing standards-based Reference Hardware Design Kits and licensable Turnkey and FW development platforms for their customers with this new platform, which will help accelerate time to market and reduce engineering costs via a Layered FW stack.

Silicon Motion indicates the following advanced technologies and enterprise features:

• PerformaShape providing ASIC based QoS sets using HW isolation to ensure maximum BW performance while maximizing user-defined individual performance elements (QOS, Latency, RR/RW, power)
• NANDCommand maximizing the Enterprise performance of next-generation NAND geometries
• with exceptional LDPC error correction and endurance extension for QLC and beyond
• User-programmable NVMe Standard and Host-Based-FTL FW
• Zone Name Space FW stack with preset options managing device elements for Application
• Optimization: NVM Set, RAID Type, # of Zones, Zone Size
• Up to 128TB in capacity
• 1024 Queue Pairs supporting up to 128 Namespaces

Silicon Motion SM8366 Specifications

Interface	NVMe 2.0a protocol support
Form factor	OCP NVMe SSD 2.0 Specification Optimized for power and performance in standard form factors: E1.S, E1.L E3.x, U.2/3
NAND	16 independent, programmable NAND FLASH Channels supporting ONFI and Toggle interface options up to 2400MT/s
DRAM	Flexible DRAM interface supporting single / dual DDR4-3200/ DDR5-4800 channels providing high performance while ensuring only enough resources are used based on SSD design requirements
Performance	> 14 GB/s Sequential I/O performance > 3M/2.8M IOPS (4K) Random Read/Write IOs
Security	Attestation, Secure boot, Key Wrapping, AES-256, Hardware Root of Trust

Market Impact

Silicon Motion plays an important role in the storage industry. While large vertically integrated providers like Samsung make their own NAND, controllers, and firmware, Silicon Motion offers up a complete reference design that any vendor can take to market. That means SSD brands that don’t invest in SSD controllers can engage with Silicon Motion to bring a solution to market tuned for their specific target.

With Gen5 enterprise SSDs creating a great opportunity for SSD vendors to be disruptive, a well-designed platform will be in high demand. Silicon Motion’s broad NAND support and pre-engineering of multiple form factors should help them go to market. It’s likely we’ll see shipping SSDs on the SM8366 by mid-2023.

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