Author: easyfilo

Enlarge (credit: Silicon Motion)

Most companies still haven’t shifted their entire NVMe SSD lineups to use PCI Express 4.0, but PCIe 5.0 SSDs for PCs are already on the horizon.

Storage company Silicon Motion said in a recent earnings call that it expects its PCIe 5.0-capable SSD controllers for consumer SSDs will be available sometime in 2024, opening the door to a wide variety of high-performance drives from different manufacturers. SSD manufacturer ADATA teased some PCIe 5.0 SSDs at CES last month (albeit without an expected release date), boasting of read speeds up to 14GB/s and write speeds of up to 12GB/s using a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller. Current high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs like Samsung’s 980 Pro top out at roughly half those speeds.

Other reports have suggested that these PCIe 5.0 consumer SSDs are coming later in 2022, but according to the call transcript, that only applies to the latest version of Silicon Motion’s PCIe 5.0 controller for enterprise SSDs—the products that end up in servers and data centers, not what typically ends up in the PC on your desk or lap. Early PCIe 4.0 SSDs for consumer PCs were also demonstrated at CES a couple of years before they became products that you could actually buy.

Enlarge / The patterns of the ocellated lizard are predictable by a mathematical model for phase transitions. (credit: UNIGE / Michel Milinkovitch)

Zebras and tigers have stripes, cheetahs and leopards have spots, and the ocellated lizard (Timon lepidus) boasts a labyrinthine pattern of black-and-green chains of scales. Now researchers from the University of Geneva in Switzerland have demonstrated with a simple mathematical equation the lizard’s complex patterns, according to a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

“These labyrinthine patterns, which provide ocellated lizards with an optimal camouflage, have been selected in the course of evolution,” said co-author Michel Milinkovitch, a theoretical physicist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. “These patterns are generated by a complex system, that yet can be simplified as a single equation, where what matters is not the precise location of the green and black scales, but the general appearance of the final patterns.”

As we’ve reported previously, a common popular (though hotly debated) hypothesis for the formation of these kinds of animal patterns was proposed by Alan Turing in 1952, which is why they are sometimes referred to as “Turing patterns.” Turing’s seminal paper focused on chemicals known as morphogens. His proposed mechanism involved the interaction between an activator chemical that expresses a unique characteristic (like a tiger’s stripe) and an inhibitor chemical that periodically kicks in to shut down the activator’s expression. The key is that the inhibitor diffuses at a faster rate than the activator, creating periodic patterning.