The Phison E12 Reference Design Preview: A Next-Gen NVMe SSD Controller
by Billy Tallis on July 18, 2018 10:30 AM ESTPower Management Features
Real-world client storage workloads leave SSDs idle most of the time, so the active power measurements presented earlier in this review only account for a small part of what determines a drive's suitability for battery-powered use. Especially under light use, the power efficiency of a SSD is determined mostly be how well it can save power when idle.
For many NVMe SSDs, the closely related matter of thermal management can also be important. M.2 SSDs can concentrate a lot of power in a very small space. They may also be used in locations with high ambient temperatures and poor cooling, such as tucked under a GPU on a desktop motherboard, or in a poorly-ventilated notebook.
| Phison E12 960GB Engineering Sample NVMe Power and Thermal Management Features |
|||
| Controller | Phison PS5012-E12 | ||
| Firmware | ECFM11.0 | ||
| NVMe Version |
Feature | Status | |
| 1.0 | Number of operational (active) power states | 3 | |
| 1.1 | Number of non-operational (idle) power states | 2 | |
| Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) | Supported | ||
| 1.2 | Warning Temperature | 70 °C | |
| Critical Temperature | 90 °C | ||
| 1.3 | Host Controlled Thermal Management | Supported | |
| Non-Operational Power State Permissive Mode | Not Supported | ||
The Phison E12 implements most of the optional power and thermal management features defined by the current NVMe 1.3 standard. The two idle states advertise great power savings and reasonably quick transition times.
| Phison E12 960GB Engineering Sample NVMe Power States |
|||||
| Controller | Phison PS5012-E12 | ||||
| Firmware | ECFM11.0 | ||||
| Power State |
Maximum Power |
Active/Idle | Entry Latency |
Exit Latency |
|
| PS 0 | 8.9 W | Active | - | - | |
| PS 1 | 2.3 W | Active | - | - | |
| PS 2 | 1.8 W | Active | - | - | |
| PS 3 | 49 mW | Idle | 2 ms | 2 ms | |
| PS 4 | 1.8 mW | Idle | 25 ms | 25 ms | |
Note that the above tables reflect only the information provided by the drive to the OS. The power and latency numbers are often very conservative estimates, but they are what the OS uses to determine which idle states to use and how long to wait before dropping to a deeper idle state.
Idle Power Measurement
SATA SSDs are tested with SATA link power management disabled to measure their active idle power draw, and with it enabled for the deeper idle power consumption score and the idle wake-up latency test. Our testbed, like any ordinary desktop system, cannot trigger the deepest DevSleep idle state.
Idle power management for NVMe SSDs is far more complicated than for SATA SSDs. NVMe SSDs can support several different idle power states, and through the Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) feature the operating system can set a drive's policy for when to drop down to a lower power state. There is typically a tradeoff in that lower-power states take longer to enter and wake up from, so the choice about what power states to use may differ for desktop and notebooks.
We report two idle power measurements. Active idle is representative of a typical desktop, where none of the advanced PCIe link or NVMe power saving features are enabled and the drive is immediately ready to process new commands. The idle power consumption metric is measured with PCIe Active State Power Management L1.2 state enabled and NVMe APST enabled if supported.
The active idle power draw of the Phison E12 is pretty good: slightly higher than the smaller Phison E8 controller and significantly more power-hungry than many SATA SSDs, but half the draw of most other high-end NVMe SSDs. The HP EX920 draws about 20% more in its active idle state.
With all the power management features turned on, the Phison E12 can no longer match the SM2262 controller in the HP EX920 but it does provide an incremental improvement over most other high-end NVMe controllers. Given how problematic NVMe power management was for Phison's earlier controllers even after several firmware revisions, this is a very welcome result.
The idle wake-up latency is slightly faster than the drive advertises for PS3, and the the power draw was also pretty close to spec for that power state. Aside from not being able to enter PS4 on our desktop testbed (a very common limitation), the power management situation on the Phison E12 seems to be trouble-free.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
28 Comments
View All Comments
gglaw - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link
new cheap competition is exactly what the market needs. I've posted this before but the pursuit of performance for most of the readers here is pretty much wasted unless i've gotten so insensitive to speed changes I can't tell the difference anymore. I have more computers that I'm embarassed to admit to and more parts than I have time to finish building more to test. SSD's in general I wouldn't be surprised if I've tested more than the whole AT staff literally, and not just running a few hours of the same suites, hundreds of hours through my LAN room. I've had every major SSD chipset released for at least several years and within I'd say the last 2-3 years I can tell absolutely no difference between the cheapest 3D NAND SATA drive and the 970 EVO and ADATA 8200 which is a gem most people haven't even heard of that are among the fastest drives ever produced for consumer use. My slowest drives are the Micron 2TB dirt cheap $250 drives that go on sale every 2 weeks (cheapest per GB drive ever made), a couple Crucial MX 3D NAND drives, a few enterprise Samsung/HP pulls that are actually brand new sold through Newegg outlet, and some Samsung 850 non-pro's. Especially on the Destroyer tests the numbers look dramatically different, but this test is absolutely useless for at least 99% of the users on this site other than the few big organization admins who frequent these comments routinely.No one including myself through hundreds of hours through my LAN room have noticed/commented on any speed difference running Twitch/streaming, chat engines, browsers, while doing many hours of OW, WOW, HOTS, and Steam library games. This is about the intensity of use of the vast, vast majority of the public, likely moreso. Now other than my one flagship with about the fastest you can get of every piece, all I go for is cheap $/GB and decent warranty on my SSD's. My current flagship is the top Ryzen2, ADATA 8200 NVME drive (basically same as 970 EVO which is in my Coffee Lake rig), GTX 1080 - and sadly the only noticeable difference is playability on higher graphics settings due to the GTX 1080s on the higher machines. The 16 threaded CPU and turbo SSD's no one can tell is even in the box. And the budget machines running RX 580s, GTX 1070s/1060s, do everything identical to the flagships other than a couple graphics settings needing to be turned down. (All the rigs are also only going at 1440p since I never felt it was enough of a difference to justify the cost to go 4k).
romrunning - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link
The only point I think you've established is that you haven't run any loads that significantly use any one component - SSD, CPU, or GPU. Well, at least you saw the GPU difference in "higher settings". If you're just doing games, I can see why you might think the big performance products don't have much of an impact. However, depending on your use case, there can be huge performance/time savings in different products.A high-thread count CPU can make significant time differences in rendering. So if that is something you do a lot, especially if you do this for work, then you will notice a huge difference in the time saved on rendering.
In virtual server hosts, you can tell a difference from an all-SSD array vs all-HDD array in the responsive of the virtual guests. In databases, you can tell big differences in SSD storage vs HDD storage (not considering memory), especially with disk I/O-intensive backups & restores.
So these are just some use cases that can highlight the significant impact of better-performing components. But all cases are different in their usage scenarios. We can't just give up on seeking better performance & go only for low-cost just because our particular use-case doesn't really display the impact of higher-performing parts.
PeachNCream - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link
I think the point of the post you were responding to was to argue that there is little real world difference in most home computing scenarios between different SSDs (not SSDs vs HDDs as your response points out) despite the benchmarks showing sometimes dramatic performance advantages or disadvantages. The other accompanying parts of the post that wander into the CPU and GPU were just there to enhance the credibility of the claim by offering an argument of broad experience.romrunning - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link
I, too, wish for more performance MLC products; however, I think we might just transition to Optane drives & hope they go down faster in price.The_Assimilator - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link
Article title: "A Next-Gen NVMe SSD Controller"Article conclusion: "...it doesn't appear that the combination of the E12 controller and 64L TLC is at all future-proof."
shabby - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link
Need a catchy title for them clicks.Holliday75 - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link
It is Phison's next gen controller.tygrus - Thursday, July 19, 2018 - link
28nm for the controller isn't new. I assume they could decrease power consumption if they used smaller fab node like 22nm. The FLASH chips themselves use/produce a lot of heat as well and 28nm might be cheaper than 22nm so compromises were made. Maybe they could bring out another version for higher performance AIC PCIe x8 or PCIe v4 signals next year (22nm fabed controller).