SK Hynix P51 and PCB01 presented as PCIe 5.0 SSDs

As part of the NVIDIA GTC 2024, storage professional SK Hynix has presented a fast M.2 SSD with PCIe 5.0 connection, which relies on an in-house controller and competes with the already available Phison E26. It will be launched for end customers as the SK Hynix P51 and in the business segment as the PCB01.

SK Hynix P51: 14 GB/s read, 12 GB/s write

In terms of key data, the new SK Hynix PCB01 is similar to the Phison E26 controller, at least on paper, and should be able to achieve up to 14 GB/s sequential read and 12 GB/s write. The end customer model SK Hynix P51 is slightly lower with up to 13.5 GB/s and 11.5 GB/s.

In the announcement, the manufacturer focuses on the omnipresent topic of on-device AI calculations and claims to have created “the highest-performance SSD for AI PCs” with the new SSDs. Loading LLMs (Large Language Models) should take less than a second.

At the same time, the new SSD is also said to be 30 percent more efficient than the previous generation, while SK Hynix uses an SLC cache to further improve performance.

According to the database entry at TechPowerUp, the specially developed controller is called Alistar (ACNT093) and supports 8 flash channels with up to 2,400 MT/s, while also providing its own DRAM cache.

The NAND flash also comes from SK Hynix. This is the 238-layer NAND presented in 2022, which has been in production since 2023.

Price and availability

The SK Hynix P51 and PCB01 are scheduled for completion in the first half of 2024 and will then be launched on the market later in the year, probably by the end of the year. The P51 is to be offered with capacities of 500 GB, 1 TB or 2 TB; the manufacturer has not yet announced prices.