A Walk Through Silicon Motion (SMI): New SSD Controllers Offer Near-GPU Storage Performance

Silicon Motion Inc (SMI) showcased their latest SSD controller portfolio at Computex 2026. We begin our tour with the consumer-segment SM2524XT, a new DRAMless PCIe Gen 5 SSD controller, with support for the NVMe 2.1 protocol. This controller features 4 flash channels and 16 CEs for up to 4800 MT/s per channel, and is designed for mid-range Gen 5 NVMe SSDs. SMI built the controllers on the TSMC 6 nm foundry node. Drives based on this controller can offer sequential read speeds of up to 14 GB/s, with up to 12 GB/s sequential writes, with up to 2.2 million IOPS random access. The controller’s own TDP is rated at 2.5 W in active mode, and as low as 1 mW in PS4 standby. The controller supports all popular 3D TLC and QLC NAND flash memory types.

SMI also showed us their first PCI-Express Gen 6 SSD controller for next-generation enterprise SSDs, the SM8466. This controller is designed to offer “near GPU storage performance,” augmenting GPU memory, and giving you the ability to run larger parameter LLMs. The controller features a PCI-Express 6.0 x4 host interface (256 Gbps per direction, or bandwidth comparable to PCI-Express 4.0 x16). It features 16 channels with 8 CEs, each channel runs at 4800 MT/s. While not mentioned, SM8466 is likely to support NVMe 2.3, which lays the foundation for computational storage. It supports all relevant enterprise features for this role. The controller will drive SSDs with capacity of up to 512 TB, supporting 3D TLC and QLC NAND flash. As for performance, the controller is being prepared to offer sequential transfers of up to 28 GB/s, and random access performance of up to 7 million IOPS.

The company also set up a demo for a U.2 NVMe SSD powered by the SM8388 PCIe Gen 5 controller that’s been updated to support NVMe 2.1, and MonTitan programmable SSD platform. The controller supports a dual PCIe uplink of PCIe Gen 5 x4 and PCIe Gen 5 x2. It supports 16 flash channels running at 2400 MT/s, for a maximum of 128 TB of storage. The test screen for SM8388 shows 9329 MB/s sequential writes, 14602 sequential reads, 450,000 IOPS random write, and 3585 MB/s random reads.