Alongside their Computex announcement of their forthcoming SM2524XT client SSD controller, Silicon Motion was also at the show demoing its SM8388 and SM8008 controllers for enterprise users.
Silicon Motion SM8388
First up, we have the SM8388, which was announced in late 2025 and is now in silicon. Part of Silicon Motion’s MonTitan platform, the 8-channel PCIe Gen5 x4 controller is aimed at nearline enterprise storage, with the 21mm x 21mm controller being small enough to be used in not only U.2/U.3 form factor and E.3 form factor drives, but even the smallest E.1 drives as well.
Notably, the high-performance controller is meant to be used with both TLC and QLC NAND, giving SSD vendors the option to tune for write performance or capacity. On the latter front, the SSD controller is designed to support capacities up to 128GB – today’s NAND prices notwithstanding.
In regards to performance, the controller is rated to deliver sequential read and writes up to 14.4GB/second, the effective limit of a PCIe Gen5 x4 connection, or over 3 million IOPS for random I/Os.
It was this latter part that the company was eager to show off at Computex, with a live demo of a reference drive in action.
The company’s live demo showcased the drive sustaining high-queue-depth sequential write rates of over 9.3GB/sec, while reads were sustained at 14.6GB/sec.
Meanwhile, in terms of random IOPS, the demo showcased the drives hitting 450K IOPS for sustained writes, and a blazing 3.5M IOPS for reads.
Silicon Motion SM8008
Along with nearline storage, the company also had a PCIe Gen5 x4 boot drive controller on display as well, the SM8008.
While there were no live demos here, Silicon Motion did have its assembled reference drives to show off. In this case, the company has designed for both an M.2 2280 drive for internal boot storage as well as an E1.S for external boot storage.
In terms of performance, the 8-channel drive is not intended to put up the same kind of high-performance figures as the more performance-focused SM8388 being demoed, though over 14GB/second for sequential reads and 2.3M IOPS for random reads is nothing to sneeze at, either.
Instead, the marquee feature of the boot drive controller is its low power consumption combined with its integrated power loss protection. The TSMC 6nm-fabbed controller is designed to go into SSDs that will draw under 4W in total, which makes for a light load on the drive to help enable its power loss protection capabilities.
Final Words
Something that has not happened yet, but is worth watching, is the movement in the SSD controller space. With NAND prices increasing so dramatically, SSD controllers have become a lower percentage of the overall BOM cost. One impact is that SSD manufacturers use market pricing changes to evaluate different vendors. Seeing these designs at Computex usually means we will see more SSD designs with them in the coming months.
