Back in July, OCZ announced that it was working on its next generation SSD controller, the Indlinx Barefoot 3, and that it would begin sampling SSDs on this new controller in the August to September timeframe. Apparently, things are on schedule as Jess Luken, OCZ's Global Marketing Director, posted a picture of the Barefoot 3 on Twitter.

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The Indilinx Barefoot 3 (IDX500M00-BC) is manufactured using TSMC's 65nm process technology. It also utilizes OCZ's internally designed Aragon 400 megahertz 32-bit processor which supports an SSD specific RISC instruction set. This allows most instructions and branches to be executed in a single cycle.

OCZ has not announced any Barefoot 3-based products yet. However, the company has said that we can "expect SSD sales related to Barefoot 3 in the third fiscal quarter", which should be sometime before the end of the year.