Speed-reading flash drives no longer just an Arm wrestle
The YRS820 is 100 percent based on RISC-V CPU cores, and is an among the first PCIe 5 controller to use RISC-V exclusively. The market-leading Phison E26 controller makes use of four Arm Cortex-R5 cores, though it also incorporates a single RISC-V AndesCore N25F core. Silicon Motion, another Chinese manufacturer like Yingren, uses a five-core Arm CPU for its SM2508 controller: a quartet of Cortex-R8 cores and one Cortex-M0.
Arm is typically the go-to architecture for PCIe 5 controllers, so it's interesting to see RISC-V show up here. Notably, Chinese tech titan Alibaba also announced a RISC-V based PCIe 5 controller for datacenters The YRS820 controller is a consumer-grade version of Yingren's YRS900, which it launched last year for datacenter SSDs. Like the YRS900, the YRS820 controller also hits 14GB/sec on reads and 12GB/sec on writes, so it's not entirely clear if there are any notable differences between the two controllers. For reference, just about 16GB/sec is the limit for PCIe 5 SSDs on a typical four-lane interface..
As Yingren boasts that its YRS820 prototype SSD is fanless, that could be a big selling point and may potentially challenge Phison's leadership. Phison is prepping a lower-power E31T controller, but it's only rated for 10.8GB/sec reads and writes. Silicon Motion's SM2508 similarly brags about using less power and not requiring the same kind of cooling as the E26 for peak performance.
Yingren and Silicon Motion are both late to the PCIe 5 party, so it may be some time before we see consumer SSDs using their controllers. Phison's hold on the market may be hard to break.
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