Jumat, 14 September 2012

OCZs Aragon Is a 32-Bit RISC Processor Built in 65nm


OCZ has worked very much to become one of the top SSD makers and now we can definitely say that the company actually is the most influential independent solid state disk drive designer.

Sure Intel makes its own SSDs, but it is the world’s largest semiconductor company, it makes its own NAND flash and, if so desired, its own controller.

Moreover, SSDs are not Intel's main business like they are for OCZ while the former is a company that's literally many times bigger than the latter.

Moving from DRAM manufacturing to SSDs, OCZ managed an extremely successful move and despite starting from scratch, the company grew considerably and quite fast.

OCZ's SSD business developed well enough that it soon had the funds to acquire Indilinx.

This is the company that designed the first popular SSD controller called Barefoot. Then OCZ also acquired PLX’s British design team.

Initially, the company used its own firmware design skills and Marvell designed controllers to deliver some very impressive products like the OCZ Vertex 4 and the OCZ Octane, but the controller was not the company’s own creation.

Back when Octane was launched, many have wondered how OCZ managed to deliver its own controller so fast as the company did not disclose its collaboration with Marvell and the chips were branded with OCZ’s logo.

When Vertex 4 was launched with another OCZ-branded controller, some started wondering if the chips were really made by the company itself and later on it was revealed that those were Marvell’s famous SSD controllers with OCZ’s firmware.

The drives managed to deliver considerably better performance results than other SSDs using the same controllers and that was definite proof that OCZ’s team was very good at writing firmware and designing a fast SSD.

OCZ's New Vector SSD Powered by Indilinx Barefoot 3 with Aragon Core Inside
Enlarge picture
Now the company is ready with its own chip and we can’t wait to see just how powerful this will be considering that OCZ’s own talented teams will imbue the chip design with their own ideas.

The new Barefoot 3 SSD controller is reportedly powered by a 32-Bit RISC processor that is completely OCZ’s creation.

It is called Aragon and it works at 400 MHz, but if we know OCZ well enough, the company might release overclocked versions of it.

The chip is built in 65nm technology and we don’t yet know what FAB is manufacturing it.

We can see from the pictures that the prototype actually has two different connection interfaces. One appears to be mSATA while the other is likely a SATA 3 connector.

We’re pretty much sure that the retail version will only come with a single connector, but we’re glad to see that OCZ already plans mSATA models as those slow UltraBooks could really benefit from a fast mSATA SSD.

Via: OCZs Aragon Is a 32-Bit RISC Processor Built in 65nm

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