Phison Debuts E28 SSD Controller With AI-Optimized Performance And Efficiency
Every hardware and software outfit right now is like, 'You get AI, you get AI, you get AI...everyone gets AI!'. There are product segments where an AI infusion makes a lot of sense, though, and Phison sees fast solid state drive (SSD) storage as being one of them. As a result, it's showcasing its AI-infused E28 SSD controller at Computex where it's already racked up a 'Best Choice Golden Award', which is the highest available.
What makes the E28 controller so special? Summed up, it's the world's first SSD controller with built-in AI processing. Built on TSMC 6-nanometer manufacturing process, the E28 controller has the ability to accelerate AI models by leveraging Phison's aiDAPTIV+ 2.0 architecture. What this does is segment training data across a tiered caching system.
"In real-world AI training scenarios, the results are striking. A workstation equipped with four NVIDIA RTX Ada-generation GPUs training the Llama 70B perimeter models achieved 519 tokens per second using aiDAPTIV+ 1.0. After upgrading to aiDAPTIV+ 2.0 with the E28 SSD, performance surged to 971 tokens per second—the performance improvement is comparable to 187% of that of aiDAPTIV+ 1.0, showcasing Phison’s continued innovation in computational efficiency," Phison explains in a blog post.
There's also a rather large claimed cost savings—according to Phison, it's fancy AI-infused E28 controller can reduce AI model fine-tuning costs by up to 90%, making it a cost-effective and scalable solution for edge AI and enterprise AI deployment.
Beyond the AI angle, the E28 supports capacities of up to 32TB. It features a quad-CPU architecture and can enable sequential read and write speeds of up to 14,800MBs/ and 14,000MB/s, respectively. And for 4K random read and write performance, it can deliver metrics of up to 2,600,000 and 3,000,000 IOPS, respectively. According to Phison, those are 10% higher than comparable products. All of those metrics are faster than Phison's PS5031-E31T controller that we previewed several months ago.
"Overall, E28 achieves an ideal balance between data bandwidth and power usage, with a performance-to-power ratio up to 15–30% higher than equivalent competitors—defining a new standard in power-optimized high-performance SSDs," Phison says.
Phison's also points out that it achieved "first cut, first success" status with its E28 controller, with the initial design having entered into mass production.
