CES 2020 | Samsung finally adopts PCIe 4.0 standard for its latest 980 Pro NVMe SSDs

One of the advantages AMD has over Intel right now is the support for the PCIe 4.0 standard on its high-end X570 motherboards. Last year we only got to see a few NVMe SSDs that utilize this new standard, and the performance gains were on par with the expectations. 2020 should bring quite a few more PCIe 4.0 products to the market, one of these being Samsung’s latest 980 Pro M.2 NVMe SSD that was recently showcased at CES.

Samsung is usually on the forefront when it comes to RAM and storage chips, but the company somehow decided to push the adoption of the PCIe 4.0 standard to 2020. A possible reason could be that PCIe Gen 4 is supposed to be a short-lived standard, since gen 5 is already scheduled to hit the markets in late 2020 / early 2021, so Samsung needed more time to evaluate the market. Meanwhile, it looks like AMD managed to create real market demand for speedier SSDs, and we might also see some high-end gaming GPUs utilizing the gen 4 standard later this year.

Unfortunately, the CES showcase does not provide too many details on the new 980 Pro SSDs. Samsung estimates that peak sequential speeds will be 6,500 MB/s and 5,000 MB/s for reads and writes, respectively, which is quite a bit slower than what Adata unveiled for its XPG Sage model that uses an InnoGrit Rainier controller. Samsung does not mention which controller it will be using, but, apparently, it is going to be the new Phison PS5018-E18 that was introduced in the second half of 2019. This one is rated at 7,000 MB/s and 1 million IOPS just like the InnoGrit Rainier, yet the Samsung specs are not quite up there for the time being, so more fine tuning needs to be done if Samsung wants to stay competitive.

These models are part of the company’s top-of-the-line offer, still, Samsung intends to make the Pro series more consumer-friendly by introducing 250 GB capacities along with the usual 500 GB and 1 TB variants. Pricing and availability info is still unknown.