OCZ Designs Everest Controller Under Indilinx Brand, Beginning of End for SandForce?

Posted 07/21/2011 at 5:33am | by Paul Lilly

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It took few a months for OCZ's acquisition of Indilinx to bear fruit, but it finally has with the unveiling of the Indilinx Everest SATA 3.0 SSD platform. The Everest controller features a dual-core ARM chip that supports the 6Gbps interface, up to 1TB of storage per controller, and according to OCZ, it's the first ASIC-based controller to enable state of the art triple-level cell NAND flash memory.

"The new Indilinx Everest platform is a complete customizable solution that delivers superior storage performance, features, and capabilities designed to exceed the needs of the most demanding SSD applications," said Bumsoo Kim, President of Indilinx. "Combining a 6Gbps SATA Revision 3.0 host interface, a dual-core CPU, and support for the latest, most advanced NAND flash memory technology available, Everest offers SSD manufacturers unparalleled flexibility in optimizing their designs for both performance and cost."

It's also the only controller to support 200 mega transfers per second (MT/s) synchronous-mode flash, where as other NAND flash controllers support 166MT/s, OCZ says. And with Indlinx's new boot time algorithms, OCZ claims vendors can decrease system boot times by up to 50 percent over existing SSD controller architectures.

With OCZ now having it's first home-brewed controller under its belt, it will be interesting to see what the future holds for SandForce. At the time OCZ acquired Indilinx, the company said it plans to continue "utilizing controllers from other manufacturers," including SandForce, which as been the not-so-secret sauce behind many of OCZ's high performing SSD lines, including the Vertex 3 used in our latest Dream Machine build.

Image Credit: softpedia.com