It’s been relatively quiet from Intel on the SSD front lately. After X-25M G2 other companies have been left free to roam and companies like Sandforce and Indilinx have made a break for it. According to Intel’s new roadmap for 2010/2011 this may be about to change.
Among the news we see that Intel will transfer to the 25nm node in Q4. The advantages will be cheaper and more spacious drives without raising production costs significantly.
As expected we see double the capacity with all models of the assortment. We will also see a new top model in the X-25M series with 600GB capacity. There are no prices for these drives yet, but you can count on the the flagship to be anything but cheap.
The remaining drives will be slightly cheaper than current models, counting dollar per Gigabyte. It looks like Intel will only be updating the memory circuits with its drives and it doesn’t look like we will be seeing any major performance boosts compared to previous models even if there surely will be some improvements.
Later in Q1 2011 the V18 series will be updated to twice the capacity. Then we will also see a new model at 40GB. By the end of 2010 we see that Intel is planning another SSD code-named Soda Creek. This will be a ”PCI Express Full SATA SSD”, which looks like a SSD connected to a PCIe card will not have the same limitations as a SATA drive. These disks will chip in 40 and 80GB flavors.
