Today Starblaze announced the availability of the STAR1000P NVMe solid state drive (SSD) controller for high-end client and entry-level enterprise applications. Performance optimizations enable the new controller to achieve sequential reads at 3.6GB/second and sequential writes at 3.2GB/second, up to 50% higher than Starblaze's previous generation controller, STAR1000. The STAR1000P achieves random reads at 750K input/output operations per second (IOPS) and random writes at 600K IOPS, up to 120% higher than Starblaze's STAR1000. The STAR1000P features PCIe Gen3x4, NVMe 1.3 and eight flash channels to support up to 32 terabytes (TB) of storage. The STAR1000P also incorporates a multicore implementation of Synopsys' DesignWare® ARC® HS38 processor, taking advantage of ARC's extensible architecture with custom instructions that improve scheduling efficiency.
"Enterprise SSD applications need increasing processor performance to support much higher throughput with reduced latency," said John Koeter, vice president of marketing for IP at Synopsys. "Synopsys' ARC HS processors deliver the scalability that Starblaze needs to extend the performance of their STAR1000P platform for the rapidly evolving SSD controller market."
Starblaze is focused on the rapid development of controllers for the client and enterprise storage markets. Starblaze has developed broad expertise in hardware and software design that enable it to quickly adapt to the changing requirements of SSD controllers, including techniques for dynamically adjusting register allocations and instruction flow scheduling. Looking forward, Starblaze is prepared to address the challenges of next-generation and more intelligent mass storage devices with solutions for 64-bit architectures, kernel-level virtualization and efficient processing of heterogeneous buses. Starblaze has kicked off development of the high-performance STAR2000 enterprise SSD controller, with plans to incorporate Synopsys' next-generation ARC CPUs in a 12-nanometer system-on-chip.
"We believe the future of edge computing requires architectures that tightly integrate compute and storage resources, maximizing power efficiency and performance scalability," said Sky Shen, CEO of Starblaze. "We have standardized on ARC processors for our current and next-generation storage controllers as they provide us with the advanced features that we need for our product roadmap such as greater processing bandwidth, increased security and support for extended address ranges."
