Starblaze: Availability of STAR1000P NVMe SSD Controller

Beijing Starblaze Technology Co., Ltd announced the availability of the STAR1000P NVMe SSD controller for high-end client and entry-level enterprise applications.

Performance optimizations enable this controller to achieve sequential reads at 3.6Gb/s and sequential writes at 3.2Gb/s, up to 50% higher than the company’s previous generation controller, STAR1000. It achieves random reads at 750,000 IO/s and random writes at 600,000 IO/s, up to 120% higher than the company’s STAR1000. It features PCIe Gen3x4, NVMe 1.3 and 8 flash channels to support up to 32TB of storage. The STAR1000P also incorporates a multicore implementation of Synopsys, Inc.‘ DesignWare ARC HS38 processor, taking advantage of ARC’s extensible architecture with custom instructions that improve scheduling efficiency.

“Enterprise SSD applications need increasing processor performance to support much higher throughput with reduced latency,” said John Koeter, VP, marketing, IP, Synopsys. “Synopsys’ ARC HS processors deliver the scalability that Starblaze needs to extend the performance of their STAR1000P platform for the rapidly evolving SSD controller market.“

The company is focused on the development of controllers for the client and enterprise storage markets. It has developed expertise in hardware and software design that enable it to adapt to the changing requirements of SSD controllers, including techniques for dynamically adjusting register allocations and instruction flow scheduling.

Looking forward, the company is prepared to address the challenges of next-generation and more intelligent mass storage devices with solutions for 64-bit architectures, kernel-level virtualization and efficient processing of heterogeneous buses. The firm has kicked off development of the performance STAR2000 enterprise SSD controller, with plans to incorporate Synopsys’ next-generation ARC CPUs in a 12-nanometer system-on-chip.

“We believe the future of edge computing requires architectures that tightly integrate compute and storage resources, maximizing power efficiency and performance scalability,” said Sky Shen, CEO, Starblaze. “We have standardized on ARC processors for our current and next-generation storage controllers as they provide us with the advanced features that we need for our product roadmap such as greater processing bandwidth, increased security and support for extended address ranges.“