Stefan Mileschin

Following up on several announcements from Flash Memory Summit earlier this month, Toshiba has shared more information about their plans for transitioning their NVMe SSDs to PCI Express 4.0. None of their PCIe Gen4 SSDs are particularly close to volume production, so rather than share preliminary performance numbers Toshiba is talking more about which product segments will be migrating first and what other design changes are coming at the same time as the interface speed boost. Toshiba's perspective on final products and market readiness stands in contrast to the roadmaps from the SSD controller vendors that are racing to be the first ready with a full lineup of PCIe 4.0-capable controllers.

Toshiba expects the server market to be the first segment to embrace PCIe 4.0. AMD has just launched their second-generation EPYC platform with a comparative wealth of PCIe 4.0 lanes, and companies like Broadcom and Microsemi are offering PCIe 4.0 switches and HBAs. The ecosystem is just about ready to support a large-scale transition from PCIe Gen3 to Gen4, and Toshiba is expecting mainstream adoption to begin next year. They are timing their first two Gen4 SSDs for 2020. The Toshiba CM6 enterprise NVMe SSD and the CD6 datacenter NVMe SSD are successors to the existing CM5 and CD5 respectively, with the CM6 offering some more advanced enterprise features like PCIe dual-port support. Both drives will be using Toshiba's BiCS4 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory, and they're currently expecting peak speeds of 6.7GB/s.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14796...r-pcie-40-ssds