The excitement in the client SSD space recently has understandably been on the Gen 5 front. However, cooling requirements have made it difficult for vendors to bring effective M.2 NVMe Gen 5 SSDs to the market. In that context, it appears that Gen 4 M.2 SSDs will continue to have a much longer runway than was previously estimated. In order to better serve that market segment, Silicon Motion is introducing a new product in their PCIe 4.0-capable NVMe SSD controller lineup. The company's roadmap is not much of a secret, as we do expect their Gen 5 client controllers to land in Q4 2023 - in fact, an end product based on it from ADATA was already demonstrated by ADATA at the 2023 CES. However, today marks the official launch date for the SM2268XT - the third-generation DRAM-less Gen 4 SSD controller meant to play in the entry-level segment in terms of pricing, but move to the high end in terms of performance .
The key updates in the SM2268XT over the SM2267XT and SM2269XT are the increase in the per-channel data rate from 1600 MT/s to 3200 MT/s and support for the latest 2xx layer 3D TLC (as well as QLC) from different flash vendors. The new controller also brings in support for some NVMe 2.0 features (compared to NVMe 1.4 in the SM2267XT and SM2269XT). Like the SM2269XT, the LDPC engine codeword size in the SM2268XT is also 4KB (compared to 2KB in the SM2267XT). The move to a 12nm process also brings in better power efficiency.
