Because high-end is an extremely small market that gets lots of headlines but relatively few sales, compared to the motherboard/OEM market that generates the majority of PC revenue through quantity alone. Why would Marvell want to change a business strategy that's worked so well for them? More importantly, why would they take the risk of trying to compete in a small market, where if you don't end up being the absolute best, you're pretty much out of the game?
Look at Realtek, whose business strategy has been essentially the same as Marvell's. Realtek recently tried to branch out by releasing their own SSD controllers, problem is that those controllers are pretty s**t so nobody except ADATA has used them. That almost certainly means Realtek is going to shut down shop, lay off their SSD controller engineers, and write the whole thing off as an expensive mistake. Marvell will hardly want to make the same mistake - although considering that Innogrit is founded by ex-Marvell employees, perhaps they should have at least tried.
Great to see random R/W speeds finally coming up as these make the greatest difference in day to day use. Only got 4kb Q1 Read left to raise then SSDs will finally be there (though they're already pretty great).
Wow, those CDM scores are pretty impressive considering the non sequential scores, especially in the writes actually outperform the intel 905p in 4K Q32T1 and 4K Q1T1 and this is an early engineering sample [perhaps]. This makes me confident that a Samsung 990(?) PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD with MLC instead of TLC might start matching 3d xpoint
"BiWin is the ODM behind HP branded retail SSDs, so a Rainier-based SSD may be the successor to the Silicon Motion-based EX920 and EX950 SSDs."
The EX950 is the biggest dud of a product I've ever used. I had two that lasted less than a week each. Returned/replaced the first one, and the second one died a week after that.
This was in an Intel NUC. Maybe they were using crap flash that couldn't handle the heat? Maybe the controller couldn't? Whatever the case, I've been running a Samsung SSD in that NUC since under heavy load, without a single hiccup.
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ksec - Friday, January 17, 2020 - link
>the company was founded and led by a team of veterans from Marvell and other major players in the storage industry.Why did they left? Any reason why Marvell were not interested in high end SSD controller market?
PeachNCream - Friday, January 17, 2020 - link
They already felt existing controllers were Marvellous.The_Assimilator - Friday, January 17, 2020 - link
Because high-end is an extremely small market that gets lots of headlines but relatively few sales, compared to the motherboard/OEM market that generates the majority of PC revenue through quantity alone. Why would Marvell want to change a business strategy that's worked so well for them? More importantly, why would they take the risk of trying to compete in a small market, where if you don't end up being the absolute best, you're pretty much out of the game?Look at Realtek, whose business strategy has been essentially the same as Marvell's. Realtek recently tried to branch out by releasing their own SSD controllers, problem is that those controllers are pretty s**t so nobody except ADATA has used them. That almost certainly means Realtek is going to shut down shop, lay off their SSD controller engineers, and write the whole thing off as an expensive mistake. Marvell will hardly want to make the same mistake - although considering that Innogrit is founded by ex-Marvell employees, perhaps they should have at least tried.
alphasquadron - Friday, January 17, 2020 - link
Because they saw Suicide Squad and they knew it was time to leave Marvel for DC Comics.Tomatotech - Friday, January 17, 2020 - link
Great to see random R/W speeds finally coming up as these make the greatest difference in day to day use. Only got 4kb Q1 Read left to raise then SSDs will finally be there (though they're already pretty great).AnarchoPrimitiv - Saturday, January 18, 2020 - link
Wow, those CDM scores are pretty impressive considering the non sequential scores, especially in the writes actually outperform the intel 905p in 4K Q32T1 and 4K Q1T1 and this is an early engineering sample [perhaps]. This makes me confident that a Samsung 990(?) PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD with MLC instead of TLC might start matching 3d xpointJames5mith - Monday, January 20, 2020 - link
"BiWin is the ODM behind HP branded retail SSDs, so a Rainier-based SSD may be the successor to the Silicon Motion-based EX920 and EX950 SSDs."The EX950 is the biggest dud of a product I've ever used. I had two that lasted less than a week each. Returned/replaced the first one, and the second one died a week after that.
This was in an Intel NUC. Maybe they were using crap flash that couldn't handle the heat? Maybe the controller couldn't? Whatever the case, I've been running a Samsung SSD in that NUC since under heavy load, without a single hiccup.