Silicon Motion plans to formally introduce its MonTitan SM8466 SSD controller with a PCIe 6.0 x4 host interface at the upcoming FMS 2025 conference next month, according to a leak by ITHome. The new controller will enable drives with sequential read speeds of up to 28 GB/s and random read/write throughput of a whopping 7M IOPS.
Silicon Motion's MonTitan SM8466 SSD controller for enterprise SSD will feature 16 NAND channels supporting all the upcoming types of 3D NAND memory, as revealed by Wallace C. Kou, chief executive of Silicon Motion, in an interview with Tom's Hardware published last month. The controller will be used to build drives with up to 512 TB capacity that will feature sequential read speeds of up to 28 GB/s as well as random read/write performance up to 7M 4K IOPS.
Performance of SM8466-based SSDs will by far exceed not only that of the best client SSDs, but also virtually all available enterprise-grade drives.
In terms of capabilities, the SM8466 is expected to be compliant with an NVMe 2.0+ specification, as well as the OCP NVMe SSD Spec 2.5, making it suitable for hyperscale and cloud deployments. It includes SR-IOV/MPF for virtualization, SMART monitoring, and end-to-end data protection. Security features include Secure Boot, AES-256 encryption, TCG Opal compliance, and firmware attestation, a set that offers strong safeguards for sensitive enterprise environments.
As reported, SMI plans to use TSMC's 4nm-class fabrication process to build the SM8466 controller.
The leaked slide from the SMI presentation reveals general specifications of Silicon Motion's MonTitan SM8466, but does not disclose when exactly actual drives powered by the controller will emerge. According to the chief executive of SMI, the company expects its partner to start shipping their SM8466-based products sometime in late 2026 – early 2027, which will coincide with the ramp of next-generation AI servers based on Nvidia's Rubin GPUs for AI and HPC.
In fact, SMI believes that AI will be the main application that will take advantage of PCIe Gen6 drives, as traditional storage applications will not take advantage of such drives until 2026 – 2027. As for client PCs, Kou expects SSDs with a PCIe 6.0 x4 to address PC OEMs only in 2030 or later.
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