Phison E26 PCIe Gen 5 solid-state drive controller chip measured, access performance reached a new high

The author is fortunate to obtain the solid-state hard disk engineering sample of the Phison PS5026-E26 controller chip, and conduct the actual performance test first, so that readers can see the transmission performance of PCIe Gen 5.

Supports PCIe Gen5 and NVMe

Phison’s PS5026-E26 will be one of the first controller chips in the market to support PCIe Gen 5 bus, and it is expected that many SSD brand manufacturers’ solid-state drives will be equipped with this controller chip.

PS5026-E26 adopts TSMC (TSMC) 12nm node process, with dual-core processor and built-in 32bit microcontroller, supports PCIe Gen 5×4 bus and NVMe 2.0 protocol, can be matched with 3DTLC and QLC type NAND chips, and supports 8-channel transmission Mode and 2400MT/s transfer speed, in the buffer memory part, it can be matched with LPDDR4 or DDR4 memory with transfer speed up to 3200MT/s.

The author is very fortunate to have the opportunity to obtain engineering samples of solid-state hard drives that are still under development this time, and to bring the performance test to the readers. On the other hand, because the firmware adjustment of the PS5026-E26 controller chip is still in progress, after discussions with the Phison team, this article can only perform limited tests and publish some performance data.

After the firmware adjustment of the PS5026-E26 control chip is completed in the future, it can be expected that the performance will be improved, and more detailed tests can be carried out at that time. Sorry for the inconvenience caused to the readers.

▲ The overall picture of the Phison PS5026-E26 control chip can be clearly seen from the schematic photo.

Effectively shorten the game loading time

In the next part of the actual performance measurement, the author will directly illustrate the performance of the PS5026-E26 controller chip through the chart.

testing platform:
Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 7900X
Radiator: MSI MEG Coreliquid S360
Motherboard: GIGABYTE X670E AUROS Master (UEFI version F7b)
Memory: G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo 16GBx2
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founder Edition
Storage device: Seagate FireCuda 520 SSD 1TB (system disk), Phison E26 Gen5 engineering sample
Power Supply: Seasonic Prime Titanium 850W
Software Environment: Windows 11 Professional Edition 21H2 (Build 22000.978), GeForce Game Ready 516.94

▲ In CrystalDiskInfo, you can see that the hard disk name is Phison E26 Gen5, and the transmission mode is PCIe 5.0 x4.

▲ During testing, the temperature reported by the control chip reached a maximum of 78 degrees Celsius.

▲ In the CrystalDiskMark test, the read and write speeds of the Q8T1 1M sequential access can break through 10000MB/s, and the mixed test score is 7933.19 MB/s.

▲ Q32T1 128KB sequential access also has a good score of more than 10000MB/s, and the mixed test score is 6725.16 MB/s.

▲ In the Q32T16 4K random access test item, the read performance is 6012.32MB/s and the write performance is 4893.64 MB/s.

▲ In the game reading time test part, it is carried out with the official test tool of “Space Warrior XIV Endwalker”.

▲ In terms of total read time, Phison E26 Gen5 can shorten the read time by about 25% compared to the other 2 control groups, which is quite impressive.

For users, a solid-state hard drive with higher transmission performance can bring the greatest benefit, that is, it can shorten the opening and loading time of programs. For a more agile and fast user experience.

The author reminds again that since the SSD solid state drive used in this test is an engineering sample, and the firmware is still being adjusted, there is still room for improvement in the performance of the final version. Considering that GIGABYTE previously released the AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD series solid-state drives using the same controller chip, the sustained read speed can exceed 12,000MB/s, which makes people even more looking forward to the performance of the final commercial products.

Series of articles:
Computex 2022: AMD announces Zen 4 architecture Ryzen 7000 processor and AM5 platform, as well as Corsair gaming laptops!
AMD officially released Zen 4 architecture Ryzen 7000 series processors, starting from US$299 on September 27
Zen 4 overtakes rival flagship! AMD Ryzen 9 7900X, Ryzen 7 7700X processor performance measurement
Phison E26 PCIe Gen 5 solid-state drive controller chip was first exposed, and the access performance reached a new high (this article)
Zen 4 architecture analysis, on the basis of predecessors, continue to strengthen computing performance (in production)