Stefan Mileschin

Last year Marvell announced updated client NVMe controllers that we have not yet encountered in the retail SSD market, but now that the transition to PCIe gen4 is underway those controllers are already due for replacement. The new family of controllers reflect shifts in the market that Marvell is expecting, and are intended more for OEM SSDs than retail products. (Silicon Motion and Phison have almost completely displaced Marvell from the retail consumer SSD market.)

As NAND flash interface speeds and per-die capacities are increasing, Marvell is betting that mainstream client NVMe products can get away with just four NAND channels rather than eight. They're also making DRAMless SSDs (optionally with NVMe Host Memory Buffer support) a bigger part of their strategy. Those two changes combined means controllers can be physically much smaller, and Marvell expects shorter M.2 cards like the 22x30mm size to become much more popular now that they can offer higher performance and capacities up to 2TB (when using QLC NAND).

Marvell's new generation of client NVMe controllers consists of three products: DRAMless controllers with two or four lanes of PCIe gen4, and one controller with DRAM support and four lanes of PCIe gen4. All three controllers have four NAND channels, but the largest 88SS1321 that has the DRAM interface also has twice as many chip enables on the NAND channels and thus can support higher capacities than the DRAMless 88SS1322 and 88SS1323.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14701...with-pcie-gen4