Any news on the next SandForce controller?

[XacTactX]

Samsung and OCZ have released their next gen controllers, isn't it time that SandForce does too?

 

[odditory]

If I'm president of SandForce first order of business would be changing the name SandForce to something else.

 

[faugusztin]

If I'm president of SandForce first order of business would be changing the name SandForce to something else.

Maybe LSI ?

And to the OP - there is no new SATA interface, so while they could improve the compressible data write speed, there is no need to rush right now.

 

[odditory]

Pretty sure he meant next gen NAND controller, but as a matter of fact 12G SAS/SATA drives and controllers will be trickling out beginning next year.

 

[faugusztin]

Pretty sure he meant next gen NAND controller, but as a matter of fact 12G SAS/SATA drives and controllers will be trickling out beginning next year.

There is no SATA/1200 or SATA 4.0 standard yet. There is only SATA Express as an improvement:

SATA Express uses SATA software protocols over the PCIe hardware interface to increase SATA transfer speeds up to 8Gb/s or 16Gb/s.

But that one will be pretty limited in numbers, i will be surprised if we see more than two on the highend boards, one on the mainstream boards and none in lowend. The reason is that number of PCIe lanes is rather limited and SATA Express will require PCIe x2 or x4 lanes. And that is a lot of PCIe lanes, considering all 16 PCIe lanes from S1155 Intel CPU are usually reserved for main PCIe slots and you got only 8 extra from the southbridge. Few lanes are required for various devices like Ethernet controllers, additional USB controllers etc, and you are pretty much left with PCIe x4, which you can either wire up to PCIe slot on the motherboard, or use it for two SATA Express 8GB/s connectors (or one 16GB/s). Logic dictates that in case of cheaper boards this will translate to 2x PCIe x1 slots on the motherboard and just one 8GB/s SATA Express connector. In case of more expensive boards we will see use of PCIe splitters like PLX.

The only alternative solution would be if these controllers would be built in inside the chipset, but it is still going to starve for bandwidth unless Intel increases the number of PCIe lanes or introduces DMI 3.0, because DMI 2.0 which is used to connect the chipset to the CPU has only 20GB/s interface.

 

[odditory]

I should've noted 12G is coming to market in the form of SAS 3.0 first, these devices already exist but under NDA, I'm not too hung up on motherboard SATA but that'll come eventually. Far more interesting gains with SAS 3.0 especially in multi-disk scenarios due to the greater interlink speeds between SAS 3.0 controllers and expanders for example.

SATA 12G devices are dev/testing as well, regardless of the absence of any meaningful info on google. All kinds of leaked/confidential product briefs and roadmaps to be had if you know where to look.