Showcased back during Computex 2014 in June, Sandforce have been teasing its next-gen Sandforce SF3700 controller for quite some time and according to the latest leaked slide, it should be ready in Q4 2014.
The new Sandforce SF3700 is rather interesting controller due to its nine-channel flash interface, the ability to address up to 2TB of flash and support both SATA and PCIe interface. Unfortunately, as you probably already know, the new SF3700 controller was pushed back to the second half of the year, despite the fact that samples were shown back in January at CES 2014.
According to the leaked slide coming from Chinese VR-Zone, the most recent B0 revision will begin sampling next week and production orders will be shipped in Q4 2014. The slide also mentions a few details regarding the performance and suggest that, currently, the Sandforce SF3700 shows 3-4x better mixed workload performance compared to the nearest competitor. Unfortunately, there are not precise benchmark details, so we will hold until we see some real world benchmarks.
The Sandforce SF3700 is definitely overdue as SSDs are limited by the SATA 6Gbps for some time now and with PCIe support on latest Intel Express chipset motherboards as well as Windows 8.1 and its NVM Express protocol support, these SF3700-based SSDs will be a welcomed sight.
Source:
Chinese.VR-Zone.com,
via Techreport.com.