Intel leads: PCI-E SSDs also have standards

The NVMHCI (Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface) working group recently officially announced the "NVM Express 1.0," a standard specification for high-performance solid-state hard disk drives for the PCI Exress interface, which was developed for hardware designers, system manufacturers, and driver developers. A series of optimized registry interfaces, command sets, and feature sets.

Actually, SSDs have been used on a large scale in the enterprise field. In particular, the high-performance PCI-E interface products are highly favored by high-end customers. However, the product form and specifications are also varied, lacking versatility and interoperability. The primary goal of the NVM Express specification is to provide a standard, scalable interface to achieve unified infrastructure and unlock the potential of PCI-E SSDs now and in the future.

According to this standard, PCI-E SSDs can support 64K I/O queue requests with up to 64K commands per queue; interrupt architecture supports MSI-X and interrupt aggregates; ensures that threads and their requests and interrupts run on each core To support multi-core processors; support end-to-end data protection, security and encryption features, error reporting and management capabilities.

With this standard, operating system vendors only need to write a driver to support different devices from different vendors; OEMs can purchase different products from different suppliers, but all have the same feature set; product development and certification Time to market can also be greatly shortened, reducing overall costs.

The NVMHCI Working Group consists of more than 70 large companies in the industry, including Intel, SandForce, Marvell, Micron, PLX, Dell, EMC, Cisco, Fujitsu, General Motors, etc. (but did not see OCZ), of which Intel dominates, and Deploying the NVM Express standard specification requires the purchase of an authorization from Intel.