KIOXIA Delivers Up To Double The Sequential Rate Improvement With CM7 PCIe Gen 5.0 NVMe SSDs, Demo Running On AMD’s EPYC Genoa CPUs
Yesterday, AMD introduced its 4th Gen EPYC Genoa CPUs which mark a new beginning for the red team on their latest SP5 platform. The new platform is loaded with features such as PCIe Gen 5.0 support and KIOXIA is taking advantage of that to demonstrate their next-gen CM7 Series PCIe Gen 5.0 NVMe SSDs. In the demo, KIOXIA used its recently launched CM7 Series SSD which comes in an EDSFF E3.S and 2.5 Inch form factor while featuring support for NVMe 2.0 and PCIe 5.0 specifications. The SSD can be found in two variants:
Read Intensive: 1 DWPD / Up To 30.72 TB Capacities Mixed Use: 3 DWPD / Up To 12.80 TB Capacities
Both variants come with a dual-port design for High Availability (HA) applications, flash die failure protection, & a Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) supporting TCG Opal and TCG Ruby & a SED option of FIPS 130-3. The drive was tested on an AMD EPYC Genoa test platform comprising an EPYC 9354 32-core CPU in a dual-socket configuration. Other specs for the system included 64 GB of DDR5-4800 memory, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS OS, and a reference Trinite motherboard. For comparison, the older CX6 PCIe Gen 4.0 drive was used against the CX7 PCIe Gen 5.0. Both drives were 3.84 TB in capacity. The CX7 runs at a slightly higher 25W active power whereas the CX6 runs at a 19W active power mode. CM7 Series highlights include:
EDSFF E3.S and 2.5-inch 15mm Z-height form factors (U.2 and U.3) Designed to the NVMe 2.0 and PCIe 5.0 specifications, and supports SFF-TA-1001/U.3 functionality SFF-TA-1001 (also known as U.3 capable of Universal Backplane Management enabled systems Read-intensive (1 DWPD) capacities up to 30.72TB Mixed-use (3 DWPD) capacities up to 12.80TB Dual-port design for high-availability applications Flash Die Failure Protection maintains full reliability in case of a die failure Cutting-edge feature support - SRIOV, CMB, multistream writes
Starting with the performance comparisons, the KIOXIA CM7 PCIe Gen 5.0 SSD delivered a 98.5% higher Sequential Read Throughput and a 57% higher Sequential Write Throughput versus the older CM6 SSD. The drive posted up to a 13.7 GB/s transfer rate which is close to maxing out the NVMe Gen 5.0 standard that supports up to 14 GB/s. This is definitely one fast NVMe SSD & PCIe Gen 5.0 really proves that we are going to get much higher throughput speeds in the coming gen. The same AMD EPYC reference system was then equipped with a 3.84 TB capacity CM6 Series SSD that performed a sequential read and a sequential write workload test that included a 128 KiB block size, a queue depth of 32, and 1 CPU thread. No other system changes were made other than changing the SSDs as described here. Both sets of test results were compared to determine the performance differences between the PCIe 5.0 CM7 Series and the PCIe 4.0 CM6 Series. KIOXIA states that their CM7 PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSDs are currently in pre-production and will be released soon. Server platforms such as AMD’s EPYC Genoa and Intel’s Xeon Max ‘Sapphire Rapids’ will take full advantage of these drives. News Source: HXL (@9550pro)
