AMD's first SSD product, the Radeon R7 SSD, is built in cooperation with OCZ. AMD more or less slapped their sticker on a OCZ Vector 150 that is downclocked and uses slightly newer flash chips. This doesn't have to be a bad thing as AMD has no knowledge when it comes to SSDs while OCZ has been at it for many years. With the acquisition of OCZ by Toshiba, the company now also has access to new knowledge and the ability to source NAND flash chips from their own mother company. AMD, on the other hand, can introduce OCZ's products to new markets by approaching new customers, like big system integrators, through their vast customer network. AMD fanboys will also rejoice at the ability to now purchase storage from their favorite company.
Our synthetic testing provides good results for the Radeon R7 SSD as it ends up right where AMD wants it positioned, between the OCZ Vertex 460 and Vector 150 while sometimes exceeding the latter. However, when we look at our extensive real-life testing, the picture changes. The drive is still close in performance to Vertex and Vector, but usually a tiny little bit slower (2% on average). I have no idea why it is so as I made a point of going through several reruns only to get the same exact results—the firmware might have been optimized a bit too much in the wrong direction. Considering AMD's "R7" branding, which sits below the "R9", the top tier, the drive is in a position where I expected it to be—slightly above Sandforce drives, right in the bulk of competing SSDs, and 5-6% behind the top-end drives from Crucial, Samsung, and Toshiba.
AMD has set the MSRP of their Radeon R7 SSD at $164, which seems a bit high considering you can find plenty of drives on the market that are both faster and cheaper. The use of an additional 16 GB of overprovisioning might help steady state performance, but hurts the GB per dollar metric. AMD's four-year warranty (handled through OCZ), on the other hand, is better than what we find on the cheap budget drives.