Upcoming Computing Technology: NVM Express

Here’s our final installation on upcoming computing technology, prompted by a recent newsletter by one of our server suppliers, Supermicro NZ. Today, we’re looking at NVM Express (NVMe), and how that is going to take over from the ageing incumbent, AHCI.

This is what Supermicro had to say about the last of these developments, NVM Express (NVMe):

“NVMe (it stands for Non-Volatile Memory over PCI Express) is a new logical device interface that has been optimised to take advantage of the much faster SSDs available today and in the future. Think of NVMe as a standardised driver to replace the aging AHCI driver designed for spinning mechanical hard drives. Effectively it allows SSDs to communicate directly with the CPU over PCI Express while reducing the software stack latency of AHCI to achieve twice the IOPS and 50% lower latency than the older standard. In short, SATA Express and NVMe is the future for high performance SSD storage.”

This ties in quite a lot to the previous post about SATAe. In that post I reflected on the hardware side of things, whereas this deals with improvements on the software side. Looking beyond physical limitations, the speed in which the disk can communicate between the drive and software running on your computer can also impact upon performance. The previous standard, AHCI, was originally designed for HDDs which, as mentioned earlier, offer slower performance than SSDs due to their physical limitations. By introducing NVM Express, the sequence of events between you clicking a button on your computer and the drive being alerted to your request is reduced, meaning fewer obstructions and greater load times. NVM Express has also been designed from the ground up, meaning that it is specifically tailored to serve the needs of SSD drives.

So that’s all for these new technological developments. Individually the components may not deliver much in the way of performance increases, but by coupling their new-found benefits together they can help lift your computer into a new era of speed and performance.