AMD readies Radeon line of SSDs
The Radeon brand has been a staple of the PC world for years, best known as the primary competition to Nvidia's GeForce line of graphics cards. But parent company AMD is apparently not satisfied with keeping the logo exclusively on graphics boards, as its dabbling in the RAM market with Radeon-branded sticks suggests. Now you can apparently add solid-state drives to the list of components that AMD wants to sell with the Radeon badge on them.
Leaked slides (show above) circulating the Internet show Radeon SSDs already in the works. They are being built around Toshiba's new 19nm multi-level cell (MLC) flash memory chips, with three different capacities comprising the R7 family of drives. Despite the Radeon name being associated with some of the fastest graphics cards on the market, AMD is not going the ultra-high-performance route with its SSDs, choosing to rely on the SATA interface rather than the much faster (albeit far more expensive) PCI Express option. Instead, reliability may be more of a selling point, as the company claims mean time between failures at 2.3 million hours and offers a longer-than-average four-year warranty.
