Definitely, yeah. It is however a good amount cheaper.
I imagine you know this but I looked it up for myself & others: $629 RRP for the 1TB 970 Pro, but currently selling for $313 on Newegg.
I haven't looked at relative endurances yet, but I assume there is a rather large gap?
What does this leave in the EVO line? QLC? They better make that cheap as chips, because the QVO/QLC line has been lacklustre in price & performance.
The write endurance of the 1TB 970 Pro is 1,200 TB. The write endurance of this new 1TB 980 Pro is only half of that at 600TB.
MLC was the big differentiator for the Pro line. If it's not MLC, then why not just buy an EVO or a TLC drive from a different brand?
Anandtech has a review of this new 980 Pro.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16087/the-samsung-980-pro-pcie-4-ssd-review
"In many ways, this drive could have easily been labeled the 980 EVO as a replacement for the 970 EVO Plus. Along with switching to TLC NAND, Samsung has cut the write endurance ratings in half to 0.3 DWPD and dropped the usable capacities down to the typical TLC/EVO levels of 250/500/1000 GB instead of 256/512/1024 GB. TLC means the 980 PRO now relies on SLC caching for its peak write speeds, and write performance will drop substantially if the SLC cache is ever filled. However, Samsung has offset this by configuring the 980 PRO to use substantially larger SLC cache sizes than their previous EVO drives, and this is what will give it the Pro name more than anything else.. MSRPs are also now much lower, and comparable to other TLC-based PCIe 4 SSDs."