OCZ has introduced its next generation solid state drive memory controller today in the form of the new Indilinx Everest chip. As you may recall, OCZ went all-in with SSD products earlier this year when they announced they would acquire Indilinx, a company mostly known for producing the "Barefoot" controller used on the first generation OCZ Vertex solid state drives.
Highlights of the Everest controller include dual ARM CPU cores, sequential transfer rates of up to 500MB/s, support for MLC NAND and next generation three bit per cell NAND flash. Support for 6Gbps SATA is of course there, up to 8 channels of ONFI 2.0/Toggle 1.0 Flash at up to 200MT/s, NCQ and TRIM support. OCZ also claims to have optimized the drives for transactions of 4K and 16K compressed files and worked on boot time reductions for instant-on applications – we hope this extends to practical reductions on wake-from-standby or hibernation modes in Windows, for example.
The company hasn't disclosed specifics on products that will be powered by the Indilinx Everest controller, though they say the platform is now ready for OEM validation, meaning they plan to open up to other SSD manufacturers to use the controller. Everest maxes out at 1TB storage capacity, though we doubt many drives will hit that ceiling considering today's steep prices for 512GB and larger drives.
"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 unparallel flexibility in optimizing their designs for both performance and cost" said Bumsoo Kim, president of Indilinx.