The Asgard AN4 uses an Innogrit IG5236 Rainier controller, but its biggest peculiarity is that it uses 128-layer 3D NAND TLC memory chips from the Chinese manufacturer YMTC, chips that carry their patented technology. Xtacking 2.0. This process involves producing interconnects and NAND stacks on separate wafers, then YMTC merges them line up the millions of small holes using a high precision optical system.
Asgard AN4, China’s first PCIe 4.0 SSD is coming
To keep cool during operation, the Asgard AN4 has a built-in rugged passive heat sink with a heat dissipation area of up to 8cm². The manufacturer claims that this heat sink can reduce the operating temperature by up to 30 ° C and rates this solid-state device with theoretical performance of up to 7,500MB / s in read speed and 5,500MB / s in read, good data on their random performance.
Asgard touts its AN4 with a high endurance rating, but exact TBW values have yet to define them either. The SSD comes with a 5-year limited warranty, and unfortunately the manufacturer hasn’t shared its price either, although they have said there will be 1TB models arriving in stores in late August and two other models with 2TB and 512GB capacity which is still in the planning stage, but can presumably be purchased before the end of the year. Another of the curiosities of this SSD is that it has a fairly low cost, so it could become the cheapest SSD over 7000MB / s on the market.
Performance data
A user of the news source forums has already (according to him) put to the test a 1TB Asgard AN4 SSD. This SSD adheres to the double-sided PCB design with four NAND chips with part number YMN09TC1B1HC6C.
The user pointed out that the AN4 supports a maximum payload size (MPS) of up to 512 bytes, which theoretically allows a transfer speed of up to 7,500MB / s while others SSDs support an MPS of up to 256 bytes out of 7,150. MB / s. However, a specific motherboard is required to be able to achieve these values, noting that only AMD cards support 512-byte MPS, while Intel Z590 motherboards are limited to 256-byte MPS.
User compared the AN4 with other SSDs with the same controller but with different NAND TLC chips in the screenshot you can see above, and the performance differences are obvious, the Asgard device largely winning the game.