We've learned that JMicron will be announcing its new NAND flash controller in the near future, and this should help in decreasing the high SSD pricing we've all learned to expect in these devices.
The JMF612 chip, as it is called, uses ARM9 core in a 289-ball TFBGA and will support up to 256MB of DDR or DDR2 DRAM as external cache. The chip was designed to adress stutters during random writes, something that was a common thing with the JMF602 flash controller.
Despite the fact that JMicron tried to patch things up with the JMF602B, which obviously didn’t fix the problem entirely, some companies even resorted to using two JMF602B chips and an internal RAID chip to improve performance, and although it added to the final price it was still cheaper than certain options.
The JMF612 is tailored to the new gen NAND flash chips that will soon hit the market and these will reportedly be smaller, faster and cheaper to produce at the same time. If this actually goes as planned, it is expected that SSDs will greatly benefit, both performance wise as well as price wise. We've even heard bold predictions that SSD pricing could drop as much as 50% by Xmas, but we'll have to see it to believe it.