Earlier this month, a Bloomber report claimed that the Santa Clara, California-based Intel was planning to release a new Solid State Drive product that would provide end users with as much as 320GB of storage capacity, double that of the company's current highest-capacity SSD offering. A recently leaked slide of the chip maker's SSD roadmap comes to confirm said SSD, which is now expected to debut sometime during the fourth quarter of this year.

As previously rumored, Intel will be manufacturing its new high-capacity SSDs using a next-generation 32nm process technology, moving from 50nm to the better-performance 32nm technology. This will enable the company to develop higher-capacity NAND-based SSDs, which will provide users with as much as 320GB of storage capacity. According to the roadmap madeavailable sometime during the first quarter of 2010 and will be designed for mainstream PCs, providing capacities of 4GB, 8GB and 16GB. The new product is expected to provide SSD-like performance for the company's second-generation Ibex Peak chipset, including Q57, P57 and H57. According to available specifications, Braidwood will require support for firmware, a Braidwood module and Intel's Rapid Storage technology.

In related news, Toshiba is also expected to drive the SSD storage technology by moving to its 43nm and 32nm lithography. This will further strengthen Toshiba's position in the market, taking advantage of the NAND Flash short supply issue, encountered by several manufacturers of NAND.