Silicon Motion’s new SM8466 PCIe 6.0 SSD controller to deliver speeds of up to 28GB/s
Just when you were getting used to PCIe 5.0 speeds, the next generation of storage performance is already knocking on the door. According to a leaked presentation slide, Silicon Motion is set to officially unveil the MonTitan SM8466 SSD controller at the Flash Memory Summit next month, and the numbers are staggering. The new enterprise-focused controller is built to leverage the PCIe 6.0 x4 interface, with sequential read speeds of up to 28GB/s.
These figures, which first appeared in a leak from ITHome (via Guru3D), align with the expectations many had for the next-gen PCIe drives (twice as fast as flagship PCIe 5.0 controllers). The SM8466 controller is a powerhouse, featuring 16 NAND channels designed to support all upcoming forms of 3D NAND memory. This architecture will enable SSDs to scale up to a whopping 512TB on a single drive. To achieve this level of performance and density, SMI is reportedly turning to TSMC’s N4 process node.
Image via: ITHome
Don’t expect to slot one of these into your gaming rig anytime soon, however. The SM8466 is squarely aimed at data centre usage. It’s expected to be compliant with the OCP NVMe SSD Spec 2.5 and NVMe 2.0+ specifications, making it ideal for cloud and hyperscale deployments. The feature set includes enterprise tools like SR-IOV for virtualisation, end-to-end data path protection, and robust security measures, including Secure Boot, TCG Opal compliance, and AES-256 encryption.
The performance of SM8466-based drives is set to blow past not only the best client SSDs but almost all current-gen enterprise storage solutions. The first SM8466-powered SSDs are still some ways off and may not arrive until early 2027. This timeline means it should be available alongside other next-generation server hardware aimed at the growing AI market, like Nvidia’s ‘Rubin’ GPU.
KitGuru says: When do you think we’ll have our hands on the first consumer-oriented PCIe 6.0 SSDs?
