One of the areas that can see an immediate impact from PCI Express Gen 4 which will first arrive with AMD’s upcoming Ryzen desktop processors is storage, and to that end Phison is not waiting around to show just what we can expect from the first generation of PCIe Gen4 SSDs.

Phison PS5016-E16 performance slide (image credit: ComputerBase)

The company’s PS5016-E16 controller was on display at CES in a prototype device, and is powered by a quad-core solution combining two ARM cores with a pair of proprietary CO-X processor cores from Phison. Basic specs from Phison include:

  • PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe
  • 8 Channels with 32 CEs
  • NAND interface: 800 MT/s support
  • DDR4 interface: 1600 Mb/s support
  • 3D TLC and QLC support
  • Designed with Phison’s 4th Gen LDPC Engine

Phison PS5016-E16 prototype device (image credit: Legit Reviews)

As to performance, Phison lists sequentials of 4000 MB/s reads and 4100 MB/s writes, while providing a graphic showing CrystalDiskMark results slightly exceeding these numbers. How can Phison exceed the potential of PCIe Gen3 x4 with this early demo? As reported by Legit Reviews Phison is using a Gen4HOST add-in card from PLDA, which “uses a PCIe 3.0 x16 (upstream) to PCIe 4.0 x8 (downstream) integration backplane for development and validation of PCIe 4.0 endpoints”.

Phison PS5016-E16 demo system in action (image credit: Legit Reviews)

The Phison PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe controller is expected to hit the consumer market by Q3 2019.