Over the past few years, there has been a lot of positive news about PCIe 5.0 technology in the enterprise market. Both major CPU manufacturers and storage companies are optimistic that PCIe 5.0 will replace PCIe 4.0 to provide higher performance for servers and data centers.
In the consumer market, however, major manufacturers have different attitudes toward PCIe 5.0 due to cost and other factors, and the progress of PCIe 5.0 SSD is relatively slow.
▶ Intel/Samsung’s new products don’t support PCIe 5.0 SSDs?
Intel‘s 12th Gen Core desktop processor, released in 2021, will initially support PCIe 5. However, PCIe 5.0 only supports graphics cards, not SSDs.
Intel will release Core 13 at the end of September this year, which is said to support PCIe 5.0 SSDs. However, recent reports in the media reported that the Intel Core 13 will not support PCIe 5.0 SSDs just like the 12th gen.
Recently, users exposed the specifications of 13 generation Core Raptor Lake and Z790 motherboard. The motherboard provides 5 M.2 slots, but neither the CPU is directly connected nor the Z790 chipset supports PCIe 5.0. The M.2 hard disk supports PCIe 4.0×4 at the highest.
The industry believes that there are few PCIe 5.0 SSDs on the market, so Intel Core 13 Gen does not support PCIe 5.0 SSDs.
Similarly, Samsung‘s latest flagship SSD 990 Pro doesn’t support PCIe 5.0 but still uses PCIe 4. Rumor has it that the new Samsung 990 PRO is a PCIe 5.0 product, but on August 24th, Samsung officially announced the NVMe SSD 990 PRO based on PCIe 4.0 technology.
Why did they abandon PCIe 5.0? Samsung said the adoption of PCIe 4.0 was based on market demand rather than development or technical problems.
▶ AMD is collaborating with 12 vendors to launch PCIe 5.0 SSDs
Compared with Intel and Samsung, AMD is relatively positive about the consumer PCIe 5.0 SSD.
On August 30, AMD announced the Ryzen 7000 series desktop processor Zen4 architecture, which uses TSMC 5NM technology, the new architecture with 13% IPC improvement over existing products, and supports DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.
In addition, AMD has partnered with 12 vendors to launch the PCIe 5.0 ecosystem, including Phison, Asus, Micron, Corsair, Crucial, Galaxy, Gigabyte, MSI, Seagate, and PNY, and the related PCIe 5.0 SSD is expected to be available in November.
PCIe 5.0 SSDs offer greater speed and performance than PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Previously, AMD and Group presented the PCIe 5.0 E26 Master SSD running on the Ryzen 7000 platform at speeds up to 10GB/s, and Corsair announced the new MP700 PCIe 5.0 SSD with speeds up to 10GB/s. In comparison, today’s flagship PCIe 4.0 SSD can reach speeds of over 7 GB/s.
▶ Words In the End
Despite the strong performance of PCIe 5.0 SSDs, the price of PCIe 5.0 compatible SSDs is still very high. This determines that PCIe 5.0 SSDs can only be used in servers and data centers, while the consumer market is price-oriented. It will take some time before consumer PCIe 5.0 SSDs are recognized by the market. Until the cost issue is resolved, consumer PCIe 5.0 SSDs are expected to grow “slowly”.
As AMD and other vendors continue to make efforts, more and more vendors will promote the application of PCIe 5.0 in the consumer market in the future, and the consumer PCIe 5.0 SSD market will continue to grow.
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