Phison has been working on a new budget SSD controller which is the Phison E8. The main purpose of this controller was to compete with Intel’s 600p solutions for the budget, entry-level NVMe options. They plan to offer increased performance and lower power consumption at the same affordable prices. To do this Phison has opted for a PCIe 2x solution, so they are trading burst performance for decreased power consumption. E8-based SSDs are expected to come in capacities ranging from 128 GB to 1 TB with pricing lower than the current 600p and Phison’s own E7-based products.
These new Phison E8-based SSD should offer much more increased performance over a typical SSD and have been designed to work with 3D NAND technology. Tom’s Hardware is reporting that even with firmware in its non-final stages the E8’s performance is already higher than Intel’s 600p and WD’s Black PCIe solutions. As we know firmware optimizations are a big deal when it comes to SSDs, we can only expect these numbers to go up.
