Feed: AnandTech
Feed Link: https://www.anandtech.com
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Title: Microship Demonstrates Flashtec 5016 Enterprise SSD Controller

Date: Thu, 08 Aug 2024 17:30:00 EDT
Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21514/microshi...

Microchip recently announced the availability of their second PCIe Gen 5
enterprise SSD controller - the Flashtec 5016. Like the 4016, this is also a
16-channel controller, but there are some key updates:

PCIe 5.0 lane organization: Operation in x4 or dual independent x2 / x2 mode
in the 5016, compared to the x8, or x4, or dual independent x4 / x2 mode in
the 4016. DRAM support: Four ranks of DDR5-5200 in the 5016, compared to two
ranks of DDR4-3200 in the 4016. Extended NAND support: 2400 MT/s NAND in the
4016, compared to the 3200 MT/s NAND support in the 5016. Performance
improvements: The 5016 is capable of delivering 3.5M+ random read IOPS
compared to the 3M+ of the 4016.

Microchip's enterprise SSD controllers provide a high level of flexibility to
SSD vendors by providing them with significant horsepower and accelerators.
The 5016 includes Cortex-A53 cores for SSD vendors to run custom applications
relevant to SSD management. However, compared to the Gen4 controllers, there
are two additional cores in the CPU cluster. The DRAM subsystem includes ECC
support (both out-of-band and inline, as desired by the SSD vendor).

At FMS 2024, the company demonstrated an application of the neural network
engines embedded in the Gen5 controllers. Controllers usually employ a 'read-
retry' operation with altered read-out voltages for flash reads that do not
complete successfully. Microchip implemented a machine learning approach to
determine the read-out voltage based on the health history of the NAND block
using the NN engines in the controller. This approach delivers tangible
benefits for read latency and power consumption (thanks to lesser number of
errors on the first read).

The 4016 and 5016 come with a single-chip root of trust implementation for
hardware security. A secure boot process with dual-signature authentication
ensures that the controller firmware is not maliciously altered in the field.
The company also brought out the advantages of their controller's
implementation of SR-IOV, flexible data placement, and zoned namespaces along
with their 'credit engine' scheme for multi-tenant cloud workloads. These
aspects were also brought out in other demonstrations.

Microchip's press release included quotes from the usual NAND vendors -
Solidigm, Kioxia, and Micron. On the customer front, Longsys has been using
Flashtec controllers in their enterprise offerings along with YMTC NAND. It
is likely that this collaboration will continue further using the new 5016
controller.

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