How Phison and AMD Enable Next-Gen Gaming

By Chris Ramseyer | Nov 7, 2022 | All, Gaming, PCIe Gen 5

As gaming technology advances, so must the systems people play on. Today’s gamers can make the move to DDR5 memory and PCIe Gen5 to increase bandwidth in storage and graphics expected to run next-generation games and applications.

Recently, Chris Ramseyer, Phison Senior Technical Marketing Manager, joined host Ryan Sagare and Leah Schoeb, AMD’s Senior Developer Manager, on the AMD Meet the Experts webinar to discuss how AMD and Phison are developing advanced platforms and products to meet—and exceed—gamers’ performance needs of today.

A partnership supporting tomorrow’s high-performance applications

For more than 20 years, AMD and Phison have partnered to develop complementary technology and products to deliver systems that can handle even the most demanding applications. Ramseyer said that AMD and Phison are really good at working together on advancing platforms and getting extreme speeds from the systems.

The two companies aligned technologies more closely to achieve some market firsts. For example, in 2019 AMD shipped the first PCIe Gen4 platform, based on the X570 chipset and Ryzen 3000 Series processors. At the same time, Phison shipped the first PCIe Gen4 SSD, based on the PS5016-E16 with up to 5,000 MB/s performance. Both companies had to work in cooperation to achieve a strict timeline for protocol and compatibility testing.

This year, the companies have done it again. AMD shipped the first PCIe Gen5 platform that supports Gen5 storage on the X670 chipset and Ryzen 7000 Series processors. And Phison now offers PCIe Gen5 high-performance SSD solutions that nearly double the performance of PCIe Gen4 SSDs.

Let’s take a closer look at both.

Products that will change the game – literally

AMD Ryzen 7000 Series

The Ryzen 7000 Series is AMD’s first Gen5 platform. It features a Zen4 processor with 5nm technology and AM5 chipset. It supports PCIe Gen5 as well as DDR5 overclocking. It is considered the fastest core in gaming today.

The system can support up to 44 PCIe lanes, and 20 of those lanes are dedicated to PCIe Gen5, which deliver double the bandwidth per lane over the previous generation. Other features include 16 cores, 32 threads, up to 5.7 GHz boost and up to 80 MB cache.

AMD improved its processor and has attained market leadership in terms of the number of cores and their efficiency. With on-board video capabilities, the platform is able to continue delivering the extreme processing with the high bandwidth and still have video without sacrificing that top performance.

The platform allows for five M.2 SSDs, for close to 75 GB/s when all are in operation. It also comes with proprietary EXPO technology for memory acceleration to enhance overclocking, extreme gaming and other workloads.

Phison E26 SSD

The Phison E26 SSD is the first Gen5 game-optimized SSD. It is built on 12nm TSMC nodes—and at almost 14 GB/s read and almost 12 GB/s write, it moves data nearly twice as fast as the previous generation did. The 8-channel controller has 32 chip enables and supports both 3D QLC and TLC NAND for up to 8 TB of storage capacity.

Using Micron’s 232-layer NAND, the SSD can deliver up to 2400 megatransfers per second, which is a significant leap over Phison’s competitors and previous generations that reached 1600 megatransfers. In fact, the E26 enables higher IOPS (up to 1.5 million for random reads, 2 million for random writes) than the industry has ever seen in a consumer drive.

The drive comes with I/O+ technology, which is firmware optimized specifically for sustained read workloads, such as extreme, hours-long gaming sessions.

The E26 SSD was based on an advanced Phison enterprise product, the X1 SSD. In fact, said Ramseyer, some of the best SSDs in history were based on enterprise SSDs that were brought down to scale for the consumer market.

Higher performance requires new cooling strategies

Thermal throttling can sometimes be an issue with high-performance SSDs. When you almost double the SSD’s performance from 7.5 GB/s to almost 14 GB/s, you’re doing significant data transfer in half the time. That system is going to get a little hot.

AMD has partnered with leading vendors to rethink cooling strategies and develop innovative products to combat the rising heat in today’s gaming systems. These include increased onboard passive cooling designed to reduce consumer costs and dual M.2 Gen5 add-in cards with active cooling for single-slot Gen5 M.2.

Because AMD and Phison have designed their products with thermal issues in mind, consumers don’t have to spend a lot of money to get the benefits of active cooling on their drives or entire systems.

Together, AMD and Phison offer winning performance

The high rate of IOPS possible with the Phison E26 will be critical to achieve the highest user experience in the market’s most advanced games. High IOPS is ideal for sustained workloads, and while those sustained workloads were traditionally seen in professional systems that rendered high-resolution video or ran CAD/CAM software, that’s all changing.

With the advent of technologies such as DirectStorage and AMD’s Smart Access Storage, consumers will see their first real sustained workloads in desktop PCs. The gaming system will use storage drives more as a cache to pass game data to the GPU, which frees up CPU cycles. That means many existing gaming rigs might not be up to the task of handling those sustained workloads like the AMD 7000 Series platforms can.

Thanks to the partnership between AMD and Phison, gamers can get a gaming system designed to support the high-performance needs of today’s most extreme titles. Together, AMD and Phison deliver systems that offer:

- - - Performance optimized for high thread-count applications
    - Double the throughput (over PCIe Gen4) for sustained workloads
    - Low latency to maximize the consumer experience
    - Enhanced cooling designed to eliminate thermal throttling

To view the complete webinar for free, click here.