In recent years, PCIe 5.0 technology in the enterprise market has been a source of good news. Both mainstream CPU vendors and storage makers are optimistic that PCIe 5.0 will replace PCIe 4.0 and provide higher performance for servers and data centers. However, in the consumer market, due to cost and other factors, the mainstream manufacturers have different attitudes towards PCIe 5.0, and the progress of PCIe 5.0 SSDs has been relatively slow.
Intel’s 12th generation Core desktop processors released in 2021 debuted with support for PCIe 5.0 technology, although the processor’s PCIe 5.0 only supports graphics cards, not SSDs.
At the end of September this year, Intel will release the 13th generation Core, and the industry expects that the 13th generation Core will be able to support PCIe 5.0 SSDs, but recent media reports indicate that Intel’s 13th generation Core will probably be the same as the 12th generation, both of which do not support PCIe 5.0 SSDs.
Recent netizens have exposed the specifications of the 13th generation Core Raptor Lake and Z790 motherboard, which provides five M.2 slots, however, whether the CPU is directly connected or Z790 chipset does not support PCIe 5.0, M.2 hard drives support up to PCIe 4.0 x4.
The industry believes that the current market has fewer PCIe 5.0 SSD products, so Intel’s 13th generation Core is not keen to support PCIe 5.0 SSDs.
It is no coincidence that the recent Samsung flagship SSD product 990 Pro also does not support PCIe 5.0 technology, but continues to use PCIe 4.0 technology. Previously, the industry was rumored that Samsung’s new 990 PRO was a PCIe 5.0 product, however, Samsung officially released the 990 PRO, a PCIe 4.0 technology-based NVMe SSD product, on August 24.
Why give up PCIe 5.0 technology? In this regard, Samsung said that the adoption of PCIe 4.0 is not a product development or technical problem, but simply a judgment based on market demand.
AMD joined forces with 12 manufacturers to push PCIe 5.0 SSDs
Compared to Intel and Samsung, AMD’s attitude towards consumer PCIe 5.0 SSDs is relatively positive.
On August 30, AMD released the Zen4 architecture of the Dragon 7000 series desktop processors, built using TSMC’s 5nm process, the new architecture is 13% higher than the existing product IPC, and supports DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0.
In addition, AMD has also joined forces with 12 vendors to push the PCIe 5.0 ecosystem, including Qunar, ASUS, Micron, Corsair, Ingenuity, Shadowrun, Gigabyte, MSI, Seagate, PNY, etc. The related PCIe 5.0 SSDs are expected to be available starting this November.
PCIe 5.0 SSDs can provide faster speeds and higher performance than PCIe 4.0 SSDs. The new MP700 PCIe 5.0 SSD announced on Corsair’s website is also up to 10GB/s. Compared to this, the current PCIe 4.0 flagship SSDs can reach speeds of more than 7GB/s.
Conclusion
Despite the powerful performance of PCIe 5.0 SSDs, the current price of SSDs supporting PCIe 5.0 is still very expensive, which means that PCIe 5.0 SSDs can only be used in servers and data centers first, while the consumer market is price-oriented and it will take some time for consumer PCIe 5.0 SSDs to be recognized by the market. Until the cost issue is resolved, consumer PCIe 5.0 SSDs are expected to develop in a “slow” manner.
In the future, as AMD and other vendors continue to make efforts and more and more vendors promote the application of PCIe 5.0 in the consumer market, the consumer PCIe 5.0 SSD market will continue to expand.
