<SSD>Innogrit Debuts With Four NVMe SSD Controllers
Innogrit's Rainier controller is a significant generational advance over the Shasta family, moving up to the high-end client and entry-level datacenter markets. Rainier switches to one of TSMC's 16/12nm FinFET processes, which Innogrit (and most other controller designers) sees as necessary for PCIe gen4 support with reasonable power consumption. Rainier has 8 NAND channels that can run at up to 1200MT/s, fast enough for any currently-available NAND. This allows for sequential read and write speeds of up to 7GB/s and 6.1GB/s respectively, more or less saturating the PCIe 4 x4 interface. Rainier adds enterprise-oriented features like multiple namespace support and SR-IOV virtualization, but client-oriented power management is still supported, with idle states for 50mW and less than 2mW.
The most powerful controller on Innogrit's roadmap is Tacoma, which builds on Rainier by doubling the NAND channel count to 16 (bringing the maximum supported capacity up to 32TB), widening the DRAM interface to 72 bits (64b with ECC), and adding more high-end enterprise features. Sequential IO performance will be roughly the same as for Rainier but random IO gets a boost from the extra parallelism. The virtualization capabilities have been enhanced relative to Rainier and the NVMe Controller Memory Buffer feature is supported, which comes in handy for NVMe over Fabrics deployments. A special low-latency mode is introduced, which Innogrit will be demonstrating with Toshiba's XL-FLASH (their answer to Samsung's Z-NAND). Perhaps the most important feature of Tacoma is the addition of in-storage compute with a deep learning accelerator; more information about this will be shared next week during Innogrit's keynote presentation at Flash Memory Summit.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14700/innogrit-debuts-with-four-nvme-ssd-controllers