AsteraLabs, a provider of data center connectivity solutions, recently published a blog revealing that Micron's PCIe6.x solid-state drive, which is currently undergoing early testing, has a sequential read speed of an astonishing 27GB/sec.
It should be emphasized that this solid-state drive is only a prototype product launched by Micron and will not be launched in the short term. Even if it is launched, it will mainly be targeted at data centers rather than the consumer market.
The PCIe6.0 standard will be released in 2022. There are currently no products based on this protocol on the market. However, there are already many PCIe5.0 products and they are gradually maturing, so hardware manufacturers have begun to gradually turn to PCIe6.0.
The bandwidth of PCIe6.x is twice that of PCIe5.0. Each x16 channel can provide up to 256GB/second bidirectional throughput. The extremely high bandwidth can meet the data transmission requirements of computing, resources and memory. This low-latency architecture is crucial for AI training and inference work that relies on real-time data processing.
AsteraLabs is currently testing the operation of Micron's solid-state drive prototype in a data center system. The demonstration setup is mainly a Fabric switch connected to the CPU host, an NVIDIAH100GPU and two PCIe6.xE3.SMicronSSDs.
Testing through the COSMOS utility shows that each SSD can provide a continuous read speed of 27.14GB/second (25.2GiB/second), which is more than 20 times the current PCIe5.0 consumer-grade SSD read speed.
Micron has not yet disclosed more information about this solid-state drive prototype, but now that it has provided prototype products, Micron is also ready. Data center products may be the first to use PCIe6.x.
The consumer market is expected to have products based on the PCIe 6.0 protocol in another 2 to 3 years. By then, motherboards and various peripheral hardware will have to be upgraded to be compatible with such ultra-high-speed solid-state drives.