Update 1/15/18 3:15 AM EST - Added Tiger Direct Business pricing at the bottom.
Specifications from Intel's next generation consumer NVMe products are now online. The two new M.2 product series fall under 760p and 660p branding. The new BGA SSD we spotted just last week also made an appearance over the weekend under the 700p name.
In the chart below, you can see Intel's full consumer SSD product line with 64-layer 3D memory. The Intel 545s came to market in June 2017 (review here), but the 760p, 700p, and 660p are unreleased products. The chart also shows the existing 600p with 32-layer NAND flash, for comparison.
The Intel SSD 760p sports five capacities ranging between 128GB and 2TB in the M.2 form factor. The performance is a blistering 3,200 MB/s sequential read and 1,600 MB/s sequential write speeds. The random performance comes to 350,000 IOPS read and 280,000 IOPS write. This is in line with the Silicon Motion SM2262 controller we saw in the Adata suite, which used the XPG SX8200. The Adata version with the same controller uses overprovisioning that shrinks the user capacity. It looks like Intel will bring the 760p to market without heavy overprovisioning to give users more space to keep data.
The Intel 700p BGA SSD shows capacities between 128GB and 512GB. This is a little different from the 1TB BGA the company tried to slide by us last week in an official PDF catalog. At one time, Intel had a 600p BGA on a leaked roadmap, but it, as well as the 610p, never came to market. BGA SSDs are embedded in products like thin notebooks. They use multi-chip packaging to fit all of the components inside one small package. Intel could still build a 1TB BGA SSD by stacking sixteen next-generation 512Gbit die with the controller in the package.
Last but not least is the most interesting leak: In the middle of the chart is the Intel SSD 660p with 4-bit per cell (QLC) flash. The SSD 660p listing shows three capacities (512GB, 1TB and 2TB). The performance is much higher than we expected to see from QLC at right out of the gate. The leak says the 660p will achieve up to 1,800 MB/s sequential read and 1,100 sequential write speeds. The random performance clocks in at 150,000 IOPS for both reads and writes.
QLC was a hot topic at CES last week, but only behind closed doors. No one wanted to go on the record, but we know IMFT (Intel Micron Flash Technology) has it ready for the most part. Companies are excited about the cost-cutting technology but need controllers to pair with it. One source told us to expect 512GB QLC SSDs for around $100.
The new Intel leaks don't list realistic pricing. One site shows the Intel SSD 760p 512GB at 5900 Yuan, which is around $917 USD. After an exhaustive search, we did find some reliable pricing from U.S. reseller Tiger Direct. The company lists the SSD 760p 128GB for $87.99, but only the smallest capacity model came up in our search.
Tiger Direct's Business site lists every SSD 760p capacity with prices now.
