A demo of Yingren Technology’s YRS820 PCIe 5.0 SSD controller – built entirely on the RISC-V architecture – showed it reading at 14GB/sec and writing at 12GB/sec, without any active cooling required.
The YRS820 is 100 percent based on RISC-V CPU cores, and is an among the first PCIe 5 controller to use RISC-V exclusively. The market-leading Phison E26 controller makes use of four Arm Cortex-R5 cores, though it also incorporates a single RISC-V AndesCore N25F core. Silicon Motion, another Chinese manufacturer like Yingren, uses a five-core Arm CPU for its SM2508 controller: a quartet of Cortex-R8 cores and one Cortex-M0.