Samsung has announced more details about an upcoming product, the PM9E1which will be the first PCIe 5.0 SSD aimed at the end-user market (what it calls PC/client OEMs).
Its predecessor, the PM9A1, was launched almost three years ago and featured the same core components as the 980 Prowhich leads me to believe that the PM9E1 might be the OEM version of the Samsung 1000 Pro, the SSD destined to 990 Pro as Samsung’s flagship SSD (and a candidate for best SSD of 2024).
In a blog post on the company’s websiteYongcheol Bae, Executive Vice President of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics, revealed that the PM9E1 “will be developed in June,” will support PCIe 5.0 and have an 8-channel controller, twice as many as the previous one. Compared to the PM9A1, there is a 100% improvement in sequential read speed and a 33% improvement in efficiency.
This isn’t Samsung’s first foray into the world of PCIe 5.0 SSD; it launched the PM1743 in December 2021, meaning consumers have had to wait almost FOUR years for a PCIe 5.0 advanced SSD from Samsung.
By then, the business community will be looking towards PCIe 6.0, which gives me the impression that it will Intel, Nvidia and AMDSamsung looks to B2B and enterprises for growth – rather than consumers.
Key to edge AI
That means read speeds of up to 14 GBps and – if the other figures increase by the same margins – write speeds of up to 10.4 GBps, random read speeds of up to 2M IOPS and random writes of up to 1.7M IOPS. No details on capacity (likely up to 4 TB), warranty (likely five years), or endurance (last generation reached 1200 TBW for highest capacity).
Bae ended with a cryptic statement about the role of this particular SSD. “It is expected to be a key product for on-device AI as it can transfer large language models (LLMs) to DRAM in less than a second.” LLM range enormously in size, from hundreds of GB to tens of TB, and there has been a surge of interest from the likes of AMD and Intel to launch a generation of AI PCs with integrated NPU.
Expect the new drive to ship with an 8th generation TLC V-NAND later this year and be available through select devices from major PC OEMs (e.g. HP, Lenovo, Dell). OEM units should be available from the likes of Amazon, Newegg, BestBuy, and Walmart, just in time for Black Friday.