neat, but I wonder what the actual cost will be for the various size of the SD 70 cards will end up being to the end consumer in a compatible device and if there is a potential chance of throttling over overheat issues which have plagued "other" devices namely m.2 drives (being in a little to no airflow situation)
I recall many a time where these type "SD cards" or for that matter many higher performance thumb drives (such as USB) dying well before they should have because they were cooking at hit temperatures just being used for a decent amount of time.
would certainly suck to have a high speed SD card that cost X amount more than a lower speed one die a horrible death because they were not build to handle themselves ^.^
interesting however, that is beyond normal SSD speeds (I wonder if this is just the burst speed or the sustained throughput and the TBW figures if those even count which am sure they would seeing as it is flash memory and/or the amount of power they will consume, as well as if can read/write to them at the same time which is one "downfall" of most any "solid state device" that performance drops off a cliff real fast when hammering the drive with read and write request especially of a mixed workload nature.
Also continuous drive shooting - Sony A9 can do 20 fps electronic shutter, full resolution compressed RAWs. It can buffer 241 of them, but the faster you can clear that buffer the better.
Really looking forwards to faster perf trickling down to the more consumer bits of hardware, which have traditionally used SD cards.
PCIe can sustain that speed indefinitely. A controller with enough channels (probably even just 4 with current flash) too, easily, especially in almost-all-sequential cases like video or RAW pictures.
Phones never used SD cards. Not the same as microSD. Photo and video cameras - depending on their chipsets. Can absolutely remove the need for huge memory buffers for sequential photo shooting, reducing power consumption and cost.
And PCs where you transfer the pictures - certainly.
The iPhone since the 6 has used a PCIe x2 NVMe single chip storage solution. Some SoCs have it internally, this would be a great reason to use it and ditch eMMC and UFS.
Indeed. And this is part of a broader trend that is seeing consumer products coalesce around PCIe as the internal differential signaling interface of choice. Just like with USB-C and cabling, the growing technical challenges of developing next-generation standards has pushed everyone towards working on a common standard rather than tasking the complete risk (and costs) of developing their own.
Finally, stopping the constant reinvention of the wheel. They can reuse cheap NVMe SSD controllers now. With NVMe 1.3s host memory buffer, the SD card might live a lot longer with much better write management.
And I actually like PCIe x1. 2 times less power than x2, 4 times less than x4, and enough performance for practical use cases when cheap flash and/or controller are the bottlenecks. And no need to try and synchronize operation of 2-4 buses which are independent by design. It would make sense to have x1 controllers, even for cheap NVMe M.2 SSDs - latencies are the same, and 1GB/s is good enough for most cases as even current top-of-the line x4 SSDs deep below in mixed loads with short reads and writes.
Funny, though how Ultra is actually not better than Extreme. According to most dictionaries: Extreme:Being in or attaining the greatest or highest degree / The greatest or utmost degree or point Ultra: going beyond what is usual or ordinary Running out of names, I guess. Coming up next: SD EX I Non Plus Ultra III.1
This is SDXC. Not the EX on the new SD Express cards (which could be SDHC, SDXC and SDUC, which are capacity/filesystem standards, not interface standard like UHS-I/II/II or Express) cards.
PCIe 5.0 will take quite a while to show up in the consumer space, despite being finalized next year. It is doubtful 2019 will see even PCIe 4.0 out of servers and datacenters, with a more probable year making it into the consumer market (including the HEDT market) in 2020. If that's the case PCIe 5.0 will be offered in 2023 at the earliest to consumers, perhaps making to servers etc in 2022. Vega 20 is rumored to have support for PCIe 4.0 (perhaps being the very first one with such support), but that is a professional card.
I really hope this standard will be widely adopted and reasonably cheap. The current situation of higher speed cards is quite ridiculous. There's XQD which is basically used by like 4 Nikon DSLR, few Sony cameras and not much else, and then there's CFast with 64GB cards costing as much as 1TB SSD.
The true competitor of SD Express will likely not be XQD, despite also employing a single PCIe 3.0 lane. In some sense even XQD (v 2.0) is effectively considered partly obsolete by the CompactFlash Association. The problem is that it lacks support for NVMe and all its associated goodies.
So what was their solution? Well, they created yet another card format (naturally) : CFexpress! CFexpress is effectively XQD 3.0 (they say that "it should" be backwards compatible with XQD), with NVMe added and 2 to 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes, starting with 2. So, assuming CFexpress devices, cards and readers are released this or the next year, they will already have that +1 lane advantage over SD Express, though the latter will almost certainly have a better bang for the buck.
CFexpress though can extend up to 8 PCIe lanes because it has little to zero backward compatibility baggage, unlike SD Express. I have no idea how much the cards will overheat and thus throttle when using 4 to 8 PCIe lanes though.
Even M.2 SSDs (even Intel Optane) cannot saturate PCIex4, even x2 only in sequential tests with QD>1 (practically non-existing case in reality). Then again, you only need what you need. 1GB/s is more than enough for any video etc.
I'm impressed with the insights the author provided, like the fact that currently Canon only uses UHS-1 in it's cameras. What major players are up is often just as important for new tech as the hardware capability's. While being harder to grasp compared to strait costs and specs. I would like to point out that the Nintendo Switch could easily fit a full size sd card but they went with microSD card. Presumably because it is more popular and at the time there was no real cost or speed difference between microSD cards and full size ones. Though I doubt portable devices like the switch will use these newer SD Express cards until the power draw is well below the rated max of 1.8 watts. As a relatively large portable device like the Switch in mobile mode uses only ~7 to 9 watts in total.
When are they planning to fix the mess that is SD type naming, you basically quite a few mins of google to know what the hell you're buying on top of searching for reliability and avoid amazon from scams.
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osteopathic1 - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
WowDragonstongue - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
neat, but I wonder what the actual cost will be for the various size of the SD 70 cards will end up being to the end consumer in a compatible device and if there is a potential chance of throttling over overheat issues which have plagued "other" devices namely m.2 drives (being in a little to no airflow situation)I recall many a time where these type "SD cards" or for that matter many higher performance thumb drives (such as USB) dying well before they should have because they were cooking at hit temperatures just being used for a decent amount of time.
would certainly suck to have a high speed SD card that cost X amount more than a lower speed one die a horrible death because they were not build to handle themselves ^.^
interesting however, that is beyond normal SSD speeds (I wonder if this is just the burst speed or the sustained throughput and the TBW figures if those even count which am sure they would seeing as it is flash memory and/or the amount of power they will consume, as well as if can read/write to them at the same time which is one "downfall" of most any "solid state device" that performance drops off a cliff real fast when hammering the drive with read and write request especially of a mixed workload nature.
Holliday75 - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
How many scenarios will they be reading/writing to them in any meaningful way for long enough periods?I guess I don't know much about SD card usage anymore as I rarely see it outside of camera/cell phone usage.
Egg - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
Cameras - 4K raw video. Enough said.Also continuous drive shooting - Sony A9 can do 20 fps electronic shutter, full resolution compressed RAWs. It can buffer 241 of them, but the faster you can clear that buffer the better.
Really looking forwards to faster perf trickling down to the more consumer bits of hardware, which have traditionally used SD cards.
rocky12345 - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
I am going to guess that is just burst speeds and could not sustain those types of speeds for any length of time.peevee - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
PCIe can sustain that speed indefinitely.A controller with enough channels (probably even just 4 with current flash) too, easily, especially in almost-all-sequential cases like video or RAW pictures.
ishould - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
Do any phones out today even have/use PCIe? I assume this will require PCIepeevee - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
Phones never used SD cards. Not the same as microSD.Photo and video cameras - depending on their chipsets. Can absolutely remove the need for huge memory buffers for sequential photo shooting, reducing power consumption and cost.
And PCs where you transfer the pictures - certainly.
microlithx - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
The iPhone since the 6 has used a PCIe x2 NVMe single chip storage solution. Some SoCs have it internally, this would be a great reason to use it and ditch eMMC and UFS.Ryan Smith - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
Indeed. And this is part of a broader trend that is seeing consumer products coalesce around PCIe as the internal differential signaling interface of choice. Just like with USB-C and cabling, the growing technical challenges of developing next-generation standards has pushed everyone towards working on a common standard rather than tasking the complete risk (and costs) of developing their own.** A - R ** - Saturday, June 30, 2018 - link
But @Ryan, The Latency of UFS is Lower than PCIe & has more Random R/W Speeds.prisonerX - Monday, July 2, 2018 - link
PCI is the universal interconnect of the future.peevee - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
Finally, stopping the constant reinvention of the wheel.They can reuse cheap NVMe SSD controllers now.
With NVMe 1.3s host memory buffer, the SD card might live a lot longer with much better write management.
And I actually like PCIe x1. 2 times less power than x2, 4 times less than x4, and enough performance for practical use cases when cheap flash and/or controller are the bottlenecks. And no need to try and synchronize operation of 2-4 buses which are independent by design. It would make sense to have x1 controllers, even for cheap NVMe M.2 SSDs - latencies are the same, and 1GB/s is good enough for most cases as even current top-of-the line x4 SSDs deep below in mixed loads with short reads and writes.
3ogdy - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
Funny, though how Ultra is actually not better than Extreme. According to most dictionaries:Extreme:Being in or attaining the greatest or highest degree / The greatest or utmost degree or point
Ultra: going beyond what is usual or ordinary
Running out of names, I guess.
Coming up next: SD EX I Non Plus Ultra III.1
peevee - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
EX is for Express. As in PCI Express (PCIe) and NVM Express (NVMe).3ogdy - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
Secure Digital eXtended Capacity Just looked it up. My bad, then naming's alright. Always thought SDXC was SD Extreme Capacity.peevee - Tuesday, July 3, 2018 - link
"Secure Digital eXtended Capacity"This is SDXC. Not the EX on the new SD Express cards (which could be SDHC, SDXC and SDUC, which are capacity/filesystem standards, not interface standard like UHS-I/II/II or Express) cards.
iwod - Friday, June 29, 2018 - link
Next, update the spec to work with PCI-E 5.0, coming out next year. Allowing up to 4GB/s.Then pretty much All laptop or computer could use SD Card as storage.
Santoval - Monday, July 2, 2018 - link
PCIe 5.0 will take quite a while to show up in the consumer space, despite being finalized next year. It is doubtful 2019 will see even PCIe 4.0 out of servers and datacenters, with a more probable year making it into the consumer market (including the HEDT market) in 2020. If that's the case PCIe 5.0 will be offered in 2023 at the earliest to consumers, perhaps making to servers etc in 2022.Vega 20 is rumored to have support for PCIe 4.0 (perhaps being the very first one with such support), but that is a professional card.
Barilla - Friday, June 29, 2018 - link
I really hope this standard will be widely adopted and reasonably cheap. The current situation of higher speed cards is quite ridiculous. There's XQD which is basically used by like 4 Nikon DSLR, few Sony cameras and not much else, and then there's CFast with 64GB cards costing as much as 1TB SSD.Santoval - Monday, July 2, 2018 - link
The true competitor of SD Express will likely not be XQD, despite also employing a single PCIe 3.0 lane. In some sense even XQD (v 2.0) is effectively considered partly obsolete by the CompactFlash Association. The problem is that it lacks support for NVMe and all its associated goodies.So what was their solution? Well, they created yet another card format (naturally) : CFexpress! CFexpress is effectively XQD 3.0 (they say that "it should" be backwards compatible with XQD), with NVMe added and 2 to 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes, starting with 2.
So, assuming CFexpress devices, cards and readers are released this or the next year, they will already have that +1 lane advantage over SD Express, though the latter will almost certainly have a better bang for the buck.
CFexpress though can extend up to 8 PCIe lanes because it has little to zero backward compatibility baggage, unlike SD Express. I have no idea how much the cards will overheat and thus throttle when using 4 to 8 PCIe lanes though.
peevee - Tuesday, July 3, 2018 - link
Even M.2 SSDs (even Intel Optane) cannot saturate PCIex4, even x2 only in sequential tests with QD>1 (practically non-existing case in reality).Then again, you only need what you need. 1GB/s is more than enough for any video etc.
Skeptical123 - Friday, May 17, 2019 - link
I'm impressed with the insights the author provided, like the fact that currently Canon only uses UHS-1 in it's cameras. What major players are up is often just as important for new tech as the hardware capability's. While being harder to grasp compared to strait costs and specs. I would like to point out that the Nintendo Switch could easily fit a full size sd card but they went with microSD card. Presumably because it is more popular and at the time there was no real cost or speed difference between microSD cards and full size ones. Though I doubt portable devices like the switch will use these newer SD Express cards until the power draw is well below the rated max of 1.8 watts. As a relatively large portable device like the Switch in mobile mode uses only ~7 to 9 watts in total.Lolimaster - Monday, June 17, 2019 - link
When are they planning to fix the mess that is SD type naming, you basically quite a few mins of google to know what the hell you're buying on top of searching for reliability and avoid amazon from scams.