PCs: AMD, Intel and manufacturers apparently have no interest in PCIe 6.0
SSDs with PCI Express 5.0 will remain the measure of all things in the coming years. The Silicon Motion boss gives an insight behind the scenes.
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PCI Express 6.0 will probably still take quite a while to become widespread. The first compatible SSDs are not expected to appear until the end of 2026 – and then only special versions for data centers. Desktop PCs and notebooks are not expected to be ready until 2030. That would be eight years from the finalization of the specification to available products.
Silicon Motion CEO Wallace C. Kou spoke to Tom's Hardware about the timetable. Alongside Phison, Silicon Motion is one of the largest manufacturers of SSD controllers. According to Kou, neither PC manufacturers nor AMD and Intel are yet interested in PCIe 6.0 outside of server processors. PCIe 5.0 SSDs with transfer rates of up to 15 GByte/s are therefore likely to remain the high-end for the next five years.
“For consumers? You won't see any PCIe Gen 6 solutions until 2030. PC manufacturers currently have very little interest in PCIe 6.0 – they don't even want to talk about it. AMD and Intel don't want to talk about it,” said Kou.
For data centers, Nvidia in particular is apparently driving the development of PCIe 6.0 SSDs. At best, the first models should be available by the end of 2026 for the launch of the ARM processor Vera and the GPU accelerator Rubin. The initial focus is on so-called computational storage, i.e., SSDs with their computing power to relieve the processor. CPU cores in the controllers could compress data and serve databases, for example. Kou does not see a need for normal server SSDs with a PCIe 6.0 connection until the end of 2027.
Rising costs
There are several reasons for this reluctance. On the one hand, the requirements for board layouts increase with each new PCIe generation to be able to transmit the signals stably. Secondly, the costs for the chips are also rising, especially for the controllers.
According to Kou, the so-called tape-out alone for a PCIe 5.0 design with TSMC's 6-nanometer technology costs 16 million to 20 million US dollars. In tape-out, a company sends a chip design to the chip contract manufacturer (in this case TSMC), which then produces suitable exposure masks for production. The estimate does not include any development costs. If adjustments to the design are necessary after the tape-out, the costs increase further.
A 4 nm tape-out is already estimated to cost 30 million to 40 million US dollars. To put this into perspective: Silicon Motion generated sales of just under 804 million US dollars and a net profit of just under 91 million US dollars in 2024 as a whole.
The fine structures are necessary to keep the electrical power consumption of the controllers under control.
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Apparently, the number of suppliers bringing SSD controllers to the market is decreasing due to the requirements and costs. Samsung and Sandisk (formerly Western Digital) are developing their own controllers. For companies without their chip development, Phison, Silicon Motion and Innogrit are the largest suppliers. In China, for example, there is Maxio.
To reduce costs, Silicon Motion wants to have cheaper controller alternatives manufactured by Samsung in the future. Samsung's technology is considered inferior to TSMC's, but is said to be cheaper.
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