Phison 2022 Predictions on SSDs

How Gen5 Changes Everything in 2022 ?

By Sebastien Jean, Phison CTO, Phison Electronics Corp.

 
Recently I was asked to make predictions for the year ahead, and I focused on PCIe Gen5 as there’s no question that this technology will change virtually everything about computing, from CPU design, device architecture and application design. With improved user experience and device-side processing at unprecedented speeds, apps will load faster than we can swipe, games will have super detailed textures, and augmented reality can be even more real.
 
In datacenters and enterprises, Gen5 will usher in accelerated ML, modeling, and inference, and deliver value immediately to those who upgrade. Even OSs and applications will change to take advantage of increased speed.
 
All the above is possible, and we know how to do them, using technologies we already have – the difference is storage caught up to DRAM speed with Gen5.
 
Write-intensive content applications, including video editing, special effects, rendering, modeling, and crypto mining rely on large data volumes. With Gen5 SSDs, these applications run appreciably faster. The tradeoff is more wear and tear on the SSD in write stress and a shorter lifespan. However, losing one-third the capacity of TLC for 20x the endurance of SLC will make far more sense in these scenarios.
 
Because storage was the weak link, applications kept active data in DRAM, but now, advanced applications will bypass the CPU and use direct GPU to SSD communication. We’ll see this new IO flow in environments like animation, special effects, crypto mining, CAD, medical modeling, AI/ML, data mining, and analytics.
 
If an SSD can now operate at DRAM speeds, what if it can go even faster? This is likely as we reach Gen6 and Gen7, because doubling the speed of a physical interface is far easier than developing a new silicon process node to create faster DRAM transistors, which falls into the domain of materials science. At a certain point it’s simply not feasible to run a transistor faster without a process node shrink that reduces the physical distance between transistors. But faster SSDs are always possible simply by increasing parallelism, and since they are typically 1 or 2 gens behind DRAM, there’s a lot of headroom. If the engineering cost to improve the physical PCIe interface and the total SSD bandwidth can be justified, there exists plenty of potential for advancement.
 
Looking beyond the fields we’ve already covered; we can see that Gen5 will change everything throughout the technology industry.
 
As I’ve mentioned, gaming is going to change thanks to Gen5, but also thanks to new workflows. Game and virtual world developers know that it’s not just storage performance that matters, it’s the consistency of the performance. (Storage is so critical, some gaming companies establish the storage architecture before designing the game.) When games can effectively bypass the CPU, and NVMe storage will deliver a consistent data stream to the GPU, we’ll see a drastic improvement in game design. Game load times will reduce, and virtual worlds will expand.
 
Automotive technology has advanced in quantum leaps in recent years, leading to vast changes in the electronic/electricity architecture of cars, not only to support modern electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles, but also superior tech in standard cars related to infotainment systems, driver assistance systems, efficiency, telematics, comfort, and safety. This evolution continues, and we’ll see higher levels of consolidation such as in-car servers, high-speed Ethernet backbones, and ever-larger data stores. The automotive industry’s unquenchable demand for storage density and Gen5 performance will only expand in 2022.
 
Hand-in-hand with Gen5 is 5G wireless technology, which is enabling edge/IoT devices that connect to cloud platforms to do more-and do it faster. 5G is already creating a need for increased capacity and performance in both local devices and cloud storage resources. Cloud storage has to be able to meet the demand of all those high-speed transmissions from edge devices.