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It is funny how some things come around. A few years ago Silicon Motion requested our review of their newest SM2708 SD Express Controller and we posted such, displaying the worlds first SD card achieving speeds of 900MB/s. That was back in 2021. That controller recently appeared in a Google Alert and it appears the latest Nintendo Switch 2 Gaming Console has the SM2708 SD Express Card controller within.
This is rather exciting news as we just might be seeing SD Express truly maturing as it should have some tiime ago. Imagine SD and microSD speeds of 900MB/s. Better yet imagine these speeds actually reaching just under 2GB/s with the possibility of this doubling to 4GB/s down the roard… from a microSD or SD card yet!
If you are a loyal Nintendo Switch gamer, the Switch 2 comes with 256GB internal memory on board, but the addition of SD Express enables high transfer speed reads and writes directly from the card. That is in addition to massive upgrades all around, but for battery life which might be just a bit low.
Normally, NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) between companies might prevent identification of internal components in gaming consoles such as the Nintendo Switch 2, but hwbusters.com did a tear down and broke the news. The Nintendo Switch 2 console supports the microSDXC SD Express 7.1 specification, features read and write speeds of 800/700MB/s and the Silicon Motion SM2708 is built on PCIe 3.0 x1 (single lane), relying on the normal NVMe SSD protocol. Take a look at the performance that we achieved 4-years ago, understanding that these tests were via a USB-bridge and not with the current direct NVMe connection. Write speeds have increased to 700MB/s since.
Looking at Amazon right now, we can see the support in SDExpress from companies such as Samsung, ADATA, Lexar, SanDisk, PNY, and Gigastone. Perhaps it is time TSSDR began a SD Express Program, just as we have done with CFExpress A/B. Stay tuned! We may even get a Switch 2 in hand for some testing!
With Silicon Motion on baard, the Nintendo Switch 2 is sure to be a Rocketship!
it was quite misleading during nintendo’s launch news saying that SD Express was “required” when infact they mean to say “suggested” for full speed performance. i have heard people using their old SD cards on the switch 2 just fine.
We have a Switch 2 on route for such testing. There are documented instances of regular SD cards working in SD Express card ports but we must remember these are two separate interfaces, the SD Express using PCIe 3.0 x1 (single lane) while SD cards are UHS-1/2. One must consider that if they are using a regular SD card in an SDExpress slot, it would be much like racing a Corvette through mud. Game load times and all other input/output functions would slow to a crawl making this combination of SD card in a SDExpress slot totally unfeasiible.