While it wasn’t on display, Phison updated us on its PS5018-E18, which will be sampling early next year. While the E16, the company's inaugural PCIe 4.0 SSD controller, was designed around an older design paired with a PCIe 4.0 x4 connection, the E18 brings an entirely new design with even more performance on tap. The E18 has a robust feature set and shares the E16’s fully-dynamic SLC cache, which helps improve performance during bursty workloads, but it also has Phison's new fourth-gen LDPC error correction engine.
Phison's older controllers feature one or two ARM Cortex R5 CPU cores, but pushing faster speeds requires more compute grunt power, so the E18 comes armed with three cores alongside the company's CoXprocessor. With that extra core and a smaller 12nm manufacturing process, the SSD flies to 7GB/s and can deliver up to one million IOPS. That’s right, one million IOPS out of a really small eight-channel NVMe 1.4-compliant controller.
