It's a DRAM-less JMF680
On the PCIe side JMicron has canceled the JMF810 and JMF811 controllers, and will now be focusing solely on the JMF815. JMicron made the decision to concentrate on the value segment and thus the JMF815 is a PCIe 3.0 x2 design with four NAND channels (no NVMe, unfortunately). A four-lane design would have required moving to 28nm process node, which would have increased the cost substantially and the packaging would have to move away from BGA to FCBGA (used by e.g. Phison and SandForce in their upcoming PCIe controllers) that would further increase the cost. I think it's a good play from JMicron to focus on a segment that isn't as populated because right now everyone is focusing solely on performance with PCIe, but ultimately cost and power consumption will be a major factors in widespread adoption and JMicron should have an advantage there if the JMF815 is executed well.
First engineering samples of the JMF680 and JMF815 are expected to be ready in Q4'15 with first retail products entering the market in early 2016.
One of the trends I saw at Computex was the move towards DRAM-less SSD controllers. The JMF608 has been relatively popular in China given its ultra-low cost and its successor, the JMF60F, will be available within the next few months. It features an improved ECC engine and a larger capacity support as well as a new, cheaper QFN packaging. Following this trend, I wouldn't be surprised if JMicron also has plans for DRAM-less versions of the JMF680 and JMF815.
A new entrant to the client SSD space, Maxiotek showed off its first controllers for SATA client drives. The first two controllers launched include the Maxiotek MK8113, designed for drives with DRAM caches, and the MK8115, designed for cost-effective DRAM-less NAND flash drives. The MK8113 support 2D and 3D (stacked) MLC, and 2D SLC NAND flash, with capacities of up to 2 TB. The MK8115, on the other hand, supports 3D (stacked) TLC NAND flash in addition to 2D SLC, 2D and 3D MLC, with capacities of up to 1 TB. Both controllers support the latest native encryption standards, including 256-bit AES, SM4, SED, and TCG-OPAL. Exclusive features include AgileECC (an efficient ECC method), WriteBooster (garbage collection and TRIM), Frequency Throttling (power management), and VPR (virtual parity recovery). ADATA is one of the launch partners, and already has an MK8115-based drive.
.Maxiotek provides a variety selection of Solid State Drive (SSD) controllers, covering SATA 6Gb/s and PCI Express SSD controllers
Thats actually a great decision, because Jmicron was plagued with bad name (which was really their fault, as they made some atrocious controllers in the past).
I suppose they will still keep making bridge chips though ? Or will they sell that to maxiotek as well.
Well if Maxiotek is a spin off od Jmircron, wouldn't all the people move from Jmicron as well
Unless they where all fired, and Maxiotek hired all new people, wouldn't maxiotek be in the same boat, as its the same people building the same crappy controllers?
Back in 2008 and 2009, JMicron was a relatively big name in the SSD industry. The industry as a whole was a small niche compared to what it is today and you could nearly count the players with the fingers on one hand. Neither SandForce nor Marvell were in the game yet, so SSD OEMs like OCZ and Patriot who didn't have their own controller technology mainly relied on JMicron for controllers. There were a couple of other options as well, such as Indilinx and Samsung, but the reason many OEMs found JMicron so alluring was the competitive pricing it offered. Since SSDs were very expensive in general, having a cheaper product than your competition meant a lot. For example, a 64GB JMicron-based OCZ Core was around $240 while Intel asked $390 for their 80GB X25-M, so the advantage JMicron provided was much more than just a few bucks.
But the pricing had its dark side: to put it bluntly, the performance was awful. The JMF602 was so bad that the drives would pause for several seconds before becoming responsive again under normal desktop use, which was completely unacceptable given that users were paying several dollars per gigabyte. Obviously, that left a bad taste of JMicron to everyone's mouth. The OEMs were not happy because reviewers were giving them a hard time. and the buyers were not exactly satisfied either. During the worst times we had major difficulties getting any JMicron based SSDs for review because Anand had been frank and said that the drives should never have hit the retail in the first place. It was hard for the OEMs to blame JMicron because ultimately it was their decision to utilize JMicron's controllers. They had validated the drives and found them good enough for retail.
When SandForce introduced its first generation controllers in late 2009, the game totally changed. Similar to JMicron, SandForce did not sell any SSDs. Sandforce sold the controller, firmware and software as a single stack to the SSD manufacturers who would then do the assembly. The difference was that SandForce's controller could challenge Intel and provide a user experience that was worth the money. Unsurprisingly many SSD OEMs decided to ditch JMicron and go with SandForce because SandForce simply had a better product. As a result, JMicron started to fade away from the market. Sure there were still OEMs that used their controllers in some of their products but the days of JMicron being the go-to company for controllers were over.
JMicron tried to get back into the game, and it did release new and better SATA 3Gbps controllers (such as the JMF618 found in some Kingston and Toshiba SSDs) but SandForce had quickly taken a lion share of the market and the industry as a whole was already preparing for SATA 6Gbps. JMicron's roadmaps showed that a SATA 6Gbps JMF66x series was planned for the second half of 2010, which made sense given that Intel was integrating SATA 6Gbps to their 6-series chipsets in early 2011. But for some reason, the JMF66x never made it to the market on time.
Now, over three years later, JMicron is looking to make a comeback with its new flagship SATA 6Gbps controller, the JMF667H.
I have to say I am positively surprised. Given how bad some of JMicron's early designs were, I could not expect much from the JMF667H. We had a try with the JMF667H in the WD Black2 but in that case we only got the picture of how the JMF667H performs with one NAND configuration. The Black2 itself had some other limitation as well (like the lack of caching option) that made the product as a whole not worth the money and probably made the JMF667H look worse than it really was. However, as our benchmarks show, the JMF667H can be very competitive when paired with the right NAND and pretty decent even with cheaper NAND.
Sure the JMF667H still is not the fastest controller on the market but the good thing is that it is not trying to be. JMicron's strategy has always been to provide more of a budget alternative for the mainstream market instead of competing for the performance crown.
The JMF667H is not perfect and there are a couple of things I would like to see. The first one is support for TCG Opal 2.0 and IEEE-1667 encryption standards. The data we carry around is constantly becoming more valuable and as a result more vulnerable to theft, so support for these two standards is crucial. In addition, I bet it would help JMicron to get their controller to more OEMs, especially in the high profit business/IT space where the customers are willing to pay the extra for encryption support. Hopefully this is something JMicron will include in their next generation controller.
The second thing is IO consistency. While the new firmware improved IO consistency and the performance no longer drops to zero IOPS, I think there is still room for improvement. I would like to see the performance being more consistent even if it means lower maximum IOPS because consistent performance means the end-user won't see variation in performance. However, I'm willing to overlook this since we are dealing with a low-cost controller and the IO consistency is already okay, but it could always be better.
All in all, when paired with the right NAND (i.e. Toshiba), the JMF667H can certainly be a noteworthy controller. It provides performance that is similar or very close to Marvell based SSDs but at a lower cost and with bundled firmware. However, I think the big question is whether the JMF667H offers enough cost savings when paired with the more expensive Toshiba NAND. As NAND makes up the biggest part of the bill of materials, it can be hard to overcome the saving from cheaper NAND, but I believe this is ultimately up to the OEM and their relations with Toshiba, Micron, JMicron, and so on. With IMFT NAND the JMF667H is still decent and I can see it being the lowest-end drive for OEMs, which is where it sits well due to the cheaper controller and NAND. For a light user the difference in performance is likely negligible anyway, and that is ultimately the market for low-end SSDs.
I am eagerly waiting to hear about JMicron's plans for PCIe. The JMF667H was admittedly late and at this point it can be rather difficult to gain interest from OEMs as everyone is preparing for PCIe. Hopefully JMicron's PCIe solution will be more timely and hopefully I'll have some details after meeting with them at Computex next week.
To me, it looks like they used a beefed up usb flash controller, slapped sata interface to it and called it a day. Great for hitting high sequential number, absolute dogs**t for everything else.
I wonder the same thing about those Chinese SSDs, what with their low 4K / QD32 random scores. The low write scores I can understand, due to smaller sized SSDs and lack of parallelism. But would that explain the low 4K reads too?
Any operation involving random data is slow on the Z400s. SanDisk's 15nm MLC flash can't make up for the lack of high-speed DRAM, even compared to TLC-based SSDs. At low queue depths, where performance really matters, the Z400s isn't that much slower than the 120GB SP550, though.