OCZ to boost SSD performance with new Barefoot 3 controller

OCZ stated it taped out the Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller, the chip is in production and solid state disks powered by the new chip will be out in August or September. The company announced the Barefoot 3 controller will offer significantly better performance than the current lineup, and that it will cut the company's costs.

"We have recently gave out our next generation Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller [to production] and expect to receive sample silicon back from our foundry partner TSMC in coming weeks. We expect to begin sampling SSDs on this controller in the August to September timeframe. We expect to have SSD sales related to Barefoot 3 in the third fiscal quarter," said Ryan Petersen, chief executive officer of OCZ, during a conference call with financial analysts.

The OCZ/Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller utilizes internally designed - the first time for OCZ - Aragon 400MHz 32-bit processor. The Aragon core supports an SSD specific RISC instruction set, allowing most instructions and branches to be executed in a single cycle, OCZ claims. The chip is set to be made using 65nm process technology at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. OCZ believes that the new Barefoot 3 SoC will significantly boost performance of its SSDs.