AMD Prepares To Ship Gaming SSDs

Lucas123 writes An AMD website in China has leaked information about the upcoming release of a line of SSDs aimed at gamers and professionals that will offer top sequential read/write speeds of 550MB/s and 530MB/s, respectively. AMD confirmed the upcoming news, but no pricing was available yet. The SSDs will come in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities and will use Toshiba's 19-nanometer flash lithography technology. According to IHS, AMD is likely entering the gaming SSD market because desktop SSD shipments are expected to experience a 39% CAGR between now and 2018.

Re:For gamers?

[Anonymous Coward]

The specs appear to be fairly normal high end for the current SSD market, but nothing exceptional.

You mean capped at the SATA bus speed. It's hard to make something significantly better than that without connecting the drive directly to a PCIe connector.

Re:For gamers?

[AvitarX]

Female razors have the handle at a different angle (one more comfortable for legs and crotches vs faces).

I learned this when I thought they were the same and god lady ones on sale, definitely not as easy to use on a face as a man's razor.

Re:Gaming?

[tlhIngan]

Seems odd to call them "gaming SSDs" when they sound like just really fast SSDs. I'm actually surprised they are marketing them that way - especially since they'd reach a wider market if the didn't just target gamers.

They're not even really fast SSDs.

550MB/s is the limit of SATA3. Something we've hit with SSDs from last year. Yes, we hit the limit of SATA3 just after SATA3 stuff started coming on the market.

It's why Apple went PCIe with their SSDs (hitting 750MB/sec easy) - the bottleneck is no longer with the SSD or controller, it's the SATA interface.

It's really more of a name thing since there's zero advantage going AMD SSD over going with anyone else. A Samsung 840 Evo already maxes SATA3 and comes in up to 1TB capacities. (Hint: when you see or hear 530+ MB/sec, that's the limit of SATA talking).

It's almost pointless to measure these days - the last metric left is IOPS and that's at the point of diminishing returns when you're getting 20K, 40K IOPS.

Now, if AMD really wanted to make a splash, they'd use PCIe and make sure you can boot off of it.