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Last year, Marvell announced the update of NVMe controllers customers we had not yet encountered in the retail SSD market, but now that the transition to PCIe gen4 is underway, these controllers must already be replaced. The new family of controllers reflects Marvell's expected market developments and is more focused on OEM SSDs than on retail products. (Silicon Motion and Phison have almost completely replaced Marvell in the consumer SSD market.)
As NAND flash interface speeds and matrix capabilities increase, Marvell is betting that mainstream NVMe consumer products can get away with just four NAND channels instead of eight. They also make their strategy a bigger share of DRAM-free SSDs (possibly with support for the NVMe host memory buffer). These two changes combined mean that controllers can be physically much smaller and Marvell expects to what shorter M.2 cards, such as the 22x30mm, become much more popular now that they can offer higher performance and capacities up to 2 TB (with QLC NAND).
Marvell's new generation of NVMe Client Controllers includes three products: two-channel or four-way PCIe gen4 DRAM-less controllers, and one controller with DRAM and four PCIe gen4 four-way memory support. All three controllers have four NAND channels, but the larger 88SS1321 with a DRAM interface also has twice as many chips enabled on NAND channels and can therefore support higher capacities than DRAMless 88SS1322 and 88SS1323 .
| Marvell Client NVMe SSD Controller Comparsion | ||||||||||
| 88SS1321 | 88SS1322 | 88SS1323 | 88SS1084 | 88SS1100 | 88SS1093 | |||||
| Market segment | Consumer, entry-level data center | Consumer Consumer | Consumer Consumer | High end consumer | Consumer & Business |
|||||
| Manufacturing Process |
FFC 12 nm | 28 nm | ||||||||
| CPU cores | 3x Cortex R5 | 4x Cortex R5 | 3x Cortex R5 | |||||||
| DRACHMA | DDR4, LPDDR4 | No | DDR4 LPDDR4 |
DDR4 LPDDR3 |
||||||
| Host interface | PCIe 4.0 x4 | PCIe 4.0 x2 | PCIe 3.0 x4 | PCIe 3.0 x4 | ||||||
| NAND interface | 4 channels, 1200MT / s |
4 channels, 800 Mt / s |
8 channels, 800MT / s | 8 channels, 533MT / s | ||||||
| Sequential reading | 3.9 GB / s | 3.9 GB / s | 3.5 GB / s | 3.0 GB / s | 3.6 GB / s | 3.2 GB / s | ||||
| Sequential writing | 3.3 GB / s | 3.3 GB / s | 3.0 GB / s | 2.6 GB / s | 3.0 GB / s | 2.0 GB / s | ||||
| Random playback of 4 KB | 690k IOPS | 500k IOPS | 450k IOPS | 450k IOPS | 780k IOPS | 300k IOPS | ||||
| 4KB random write | 500k IOPS | 350k IOPS | 300k IOPS | 400k IOPS | 650k IOPS | 250k IOPS | ||||
| Ad | August 2019 | June 2018 | August 2014 | |||||||
The sequential I / O performance of the new 4-channel controllers is only slightly better than that of Marvell's previous 8-channel controller, and the random IO has taken a step back. Marvell does not attempt to saturate a PCIe 4×4 link, although the smaller 88SS1323 with only a 4×2 PCIe link achieves the usual PCIe 3×4 SSD speeds.
Instead, Marvel claims to have the most energy-efficient PCIe Gen4-compatible SSD controllers, addressing the concerns raised by AMD's latest chipsets and the Phison E16 SSD controller that PCIe 4 is a real slot machine. The new Marvell DRAM-less controllers operate at less than 2W with an active PCIe 4×4 link, which is not much more than what the NAND flash needs. This is made possible by Marvell's jump to manufacturing at 12 nm, compared to 28 nm which was the norm for most NVMe controllers. Even though these controllers use a relatively advanced manufacturing process, Marvell says that they will allow very economical SSDs, especially when they are used in DRAM-free configurations.
In addition to the faster PCIe and NAND interfaces, the next-generation controllers feature architecture similar to that of its predecessors, with a handful of Arm Cortex R5 processor cores and the same fourth-generation LDPC engine used by Marvell's controllers. Last year.
Marvell is currently testing the new controllers and will be exhibiting them next week at the Flash Memory Summit.
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