First off we had IDE, then came SATA, then PCIe, then M2 over PCIe and now we have NVMe. We reviewed a few PCIe SSDs including the OCZ RevoDrive and more recently, the Plextor M6e which have all impressed with the amount of performance on offer so what gives with NVMe? While NVMe still utilises PCIe 3.0 it does so with much less overheads. What does this mean for you? Well compared to your average SSD over SATA interface using AHCI, the Intel 750 gives us between 4 and 8x the performance! The NVMe (Non-volatile memory express) protocol is a break from the usual AHCI protocol used for SSDs including PCIe SSDs but where NVMe differs is that is is much more efficient than AHCI. Perhaps the major advantage of NVMe over AHCI is its ability to exploit parallelism in host hardware and software, namely PCIe and multi-core CPUs. For the technically inquisitive we'll go into greater detail regarding NVMe on the next page.