Marvell has announced a new SSD controller that uses the PCI-Express interface. It'll be called the 88SS1083 PCI-Express controller, which is a bit too cryptic for anyone to remember, so let's just be happy that it'll be the SSD manufacturers who have to deal with that.
Marvell indicates that it will be the first controller that is fully compliant with the SATA-Express standard allowing it to deal with two PCI-Express lanes for transfer speeds of up to about 1 GB/s. It'll be built with a 28 nm process and have a built-in SRIC reference clock.
"Improving performance while maintaining low power becomes more important than ever, especially for today's ultrathin notebooks and tablets," said Rajan Pai, vice president, sales and field applications engineering at Marvell. "The new 88SS1083 allows SSD OEMs to offer higher performance, PCIe-based SSD solutions at similar prices to SATA and is quickly becoming the controller of choice for global OEMs. Marvell is proudly pioneering a new generation of high-performance and low-power silicon solutions that is driving our industry forward."
There is no word yet on exactly when we'll be seeing the controller in consumer devices, though Marvell did indicate that the controller is meant to be equally as cost efficient as SATA controllers. Hopefully, the SSD manufacturers implementing the technology won't inflate prices very much, though that's probably a bit too much to hope for.
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