OCZ Technology Group, a leading manufacturer of solid-state drives, demonstrated prototypes of its next-generation Vector SSDs at Intel Developer Forum. The new drives are based on Indilinx Barefoot 3 controller, the first ever controller that was designed solely by OCZ from scratch. The company claims Vector family of solid-state drives to set up new performance records in the consumer segment.

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 Barefoot 3 chip is made using 65nm process technology at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. While OCZ does not reveal exact performance figures for Vector-series Barefoot 3-powered SSDs, the company implies that they will outperform even the award-winning Vertex 4.

"Initial specifications indicate that Barefoot 3 will support a significant performance increase over our current products and as its primary IT blocks are now licensed from a third party, it provides additional incremental cost benefits to OCZ. [..] When implemented in SSD controller, the [Aragon 3 core gives] a much higher performance than when using an off-the-shelf embedded safety field. This design opens a world of new possibilities for game changing SSD solutions as it supports unprecedented levels of processing power," said Ryan Petersen, chief executive officer of OCZ, during a conference call earlier this year.

OCZ plans to start sales of Vector solid-state drives sometimes in the fourth quarter of this year, which starts in around two weeks, hence, on time for the holiday season.

Tags: OCZ, Indilinx, Barefoot, SSD, NAND, Flash