Silicon Motion announces trio of PCIe 4.0 NVMe 1.4 controllers

[HEXUS]

Lineup for performance, mainstream and value SSD applications. For up to 7,400MB/s reads.

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[Gentle Viking]

Are these compatible with older solutions,,,,, of course at the lower speed those have ?

If they are then i see no reason buying a gen 3 drive knowing i probably have 1 more PC update to do before i kick the bucket or just dont wanna hang around anymore.

[LSG501]

Curious about the highest spec one (SM2264).... wonder which brands will use it and if it's any good in 'real world' use.

[Iota]

Curious about the highest spec one (SM2264).... wonder which brands will use it and if it's any good in 'real world' use.

I just find it amusing that it's run by a quad core ARM CPU. I mean I know these things need controllers, but needing a CPU to help feed a CPU data I'm finding quite ironic.

[LSG501]

I just find it amusing that it's run by a quad core ARM CPU. I mean I know these things need controllers, but needing a CPU to help feed a CPU data I'm finding quite ironic.

I'd say it's more about handling the throughput with pcie4 these days, not to mention they often seem to have built in encryption etc so having 'dedicated' hardware isn't actually a bad thing and ARM is likely a good platform to build around due to it being partially modular etc.

It's not just this one using an arm cpu either, the Samsung 970 pro uses a 5 core arm based controller and I wouldn't be shocked if newer ones from Samsung is using arm too, as I would suspect other brands.

[DanceswithUnix]

I just find it amusing that it's run by a quad core ARM CPU. I mean I know these things need controllers, but needing a CPU to help feed a CPU data I'm finding quite ironic.

That seems fair enough, but it is the speed of these controllers that gets me.

I dug out my Atari ST recently for the kids to have a laugh at. 8MHz and 1MB of ram got me through university, and now my mouse has more computing power than that (and probably a sizable amount of ram as well).

[LSG501]

That seems fair enough, but it is the speed of these controllers that gets me.

I dug out my Atari ST recently for the kids to have a laugh at. 8MHz and 1MB of ram got me through university, and now my mouse has more computing power than that (and probably a sizable amount of ram as well).

Yeah that does make you laugh when you look back on what you could do with far less... I was thinking back to my uni days and up until the final year (nearly 20 years ago now) I was coping with 1GB of ram and dual processors, the same thing now (same file in fact) wouldn't even load up without 8GB on the newest version of the software lol.

[kellyharding]

That seems fair enough, but it is the speed of these controllers that gets me.

I dug out my Atari ST recently for the kids to have a laugh at. 8MHz and 1MB of ram got me through university, and now my mouse has more computing power than that (and probably a sizable amount of ram as well).

Yeah that does make you laugh when you look back on what you could do with far less... I was thinking back to my uni days and up until the final year (nearly 20 years ago now) I was coping with 1GB of ram and dual processors, the same thing now (same file in fact) wouldn't even load up without 8GB on the newest version of the software lol.

When I was at university I was still using a Pentium 75 with 256Mb ram at home, it did the job well enough for most tasks that I needed, just. This was late 90s/early 2000s though. Mind, the university had a load of much more powerful systems in the labs which were open 24/7, though they still had some ancient systems in some of the labs, still running windows for workgroups 3.11, with newer ones on nt4.

[Dashers]

Are these compatible with older solutions,,,,, of course at the lower speed those have ?

If they are then i see no reason buying a gen 3 drive knowing i probably have 1 more PC update to do before i kick the bucket or just dont wanna hang around anymore.

Should be, as you say, just limited by the bandwidth available.

I intend to do just this: ultimate plan is to get x4 1TB PCIe 4.0 drives and pop them in a bifurcated adapter card. But, my motherboard doesn't support bifurcation, nor PCIe 4.0, but I'm getting tight on space at the moment. So buying a 1TB PCIe 4.0 drive straight into a PCIe 3.0 slot (with single adapter) should help extend the life of my investment.

[DanceswithUnix]

Yeah that does make you laugh when you look back on what you could do with far less... I was thinking back to my uni days and up until the final year (nearly 20 years ago now) I was coping with 1GB of ram and dual processors, the same thing now (same file in fact) wouldn't even load up without 8GB on the newest version of the software lol.

The crazy bit is some of the software I had on that (specially the spreadsheet that I used for drawing graphs for engineering labs) I have yet to find anything as good since.

I could write my report in a First Word Plus, a nice easy to use word processor that was the first one I came across with as you type spell checking, draw some really nice looking lin/log graphs, and then tie it together in a DTP package and send it to a laser printer. For all the fancy technology and processing power some 4 magnitudes more CPU power, SSDs that are faster than the Atari's ram, it isn't actually much easier or faster to write such a document and I can't get graphs that look as nice.

The 320x200 graphics is a bit cringeworthy these days, I don't miss that

[kompukare]

The crazy bit is some of the software I had on that (specially the spreadsheet that I used for drawing graphs for engineering labs) I have yet to find anything as good since.

I could write my report in a First Word Plus, a nice easy to use word processor that was the first one I came across with as you type spell checking, draw some really nice looking lin/log graphs, and then tie it together in a DTP package and send it to a laser printer. For all the fancy technology and processing power some 4 magnitudes more CPU power, SSDs that are faster than the Atari's ram, it isn't actually much easier or faster to write such a document and I can't get graphs that look as nice.

The 320x200 graphics is a bit cringeworthy these days, I don't miss that

Someone who use an ST productively without the legendary SM124 70Hz, 640x400 digital display?
Tempus Word and Le Rédacteur were crazily fast at word processing. Not sure if Word on my current machine actually outperforms them.

[LSG501]

The crazy bit is some of the software I had on that (specially the spreadsheet that I used for drawing graphs for engineering labs) I have yet to find anything as good since.

I could write my report in a First Word Plus, a nice easy to use word processor that was the first one I came across with as you type spell checking, draw some really nice looking lin/log graphs, and then tie it together in a DTP package and send it to a laser printer. For all the fancy technology and processing power some 4 magnitudes more CPU power, SSDs that are faster than the Atari's ram, it isn't actually much easier or faster to write such a document and I can't get graphs that look as nice.

The 320x200 graphics is a bit cringeworthy these days, I don't miss that

Yeah that is the strange thing, some of the 'better' software we have now is actually less 'full featured' than old stuff.... I'm sure I've had some software in the 'good old days' that worked better than current stuff.

[DanceswithUnix]

Someone who use an ST productively without the legendary SM124 70Hz, 640x400 digital display?
Tempus Word and Le Rédacteur were crazily fast at word processing. Not sure if Word on my current machine actually outperforms them.

I do have an SM124, but that is right at the back of the loft behind a lot of boxes and I wasn't even sure the ST would power up after some years up there

I found an ST to SCART cable, and plugged it into a modern 1080p TV. The picture looks a lot worse than I remember, so perhaps modern TVs aren't tuned to such low resolutions.

OTOH, the SM124 monitor is I think next to the Atari TT and I'm tempted to dig that out next!

[kompukare]

I do have an SM124, but that is right at the back of the loft behind a lot of boxes and I wasn't even sure the ST would power up after some years up there

I found an ST to SCART cable, and plugged it into a modern 1080p TV. The picture looks a lot worse than I remember, so perhaps modern TVs aren't tuned to such low resolutions.

OTOH, the SM124 monitor is I think next to the Atari TT and I'm tempted to dig that out next!

While SM124 rolls off my tongue to this day without having to look it up, the TT also had a digital monochrome monitor. "Monochrome: 1280×960 mono TT high with ECL 19 in (483 mm) TTM195 monitor, according the Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_TT030

Hm, 19" is almost laptop size these days but once was enough to be taken (somewhat) seriously in the DTP world.

[chj]

Are there any other competing memory controllers or is SM the bread and butter of most SSDs?

[LSG501]

Are there any other competing memory controllers or is SM the bread and butter of most SSDs?

IIRC - Phison on things like corsair/sabrent and samsung has their own controller too as far as I know. Could be some others but they're the ones I know off the top of my head.