FTC wants more data on Intel flash spinoff
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Antitrust regulators in the US have asked Intel and STMicroelectronics for additional  data on the planned spinoff of their flash memory unit.
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Memory device company Spansion Inc.  said on Monday it was looking for more partners to cut development costs and pack more power into flash memory chips and expand its product line-up.
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U.S. government antitrust regulators have asked Intel Corp. and STMicroelectronics NV to provide more information about theirÂ plan to spin off their flash memory unit into a new company, the vendors said Thursday.
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By Therese Poletti, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  Mar. 6--Intel said it may not be able to provide all the electronic documents that rival Advanced Micro Devices is requesting in an antitrust lawsuit because of human error.   In a letter Monday to U.S.
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EMC plans to introduce a line of solid-state drives using flash memory as an option to replace some disk drives in the company&#39;s high-end Symmetrix storage arrays, a company spokesman said Monday.EMC will offer solid-state drives with capacities of 73GB and 146GB, said Abhrajit Bhattacharjee, an EMC spokesman in Singapore. The drives, which will ship this quarter, will only be available as an option with Symmetrix storage arrays, and will not be available with other products, he said.Pricing for the solid-state drives&#160;was not immediately available, but using four 73GB solid-state drives to replace four of the 146GB hard disk drives in a Symmetrix 100-disk array would increase the cost by less than 10 percent compared to a comparable system using only hard disk drives, Bhattacharjee said.Solid-state drives use memory chips instead of magnetic platters to store information. These types of drives are generally faster and consume less power than traditional disk drives, but they are also significantly more expensive.The solid-state drives are aimed at customers willing to pay a premium for the significantly faster response times these drives offer, Bhattacharjee said.EMC plans to use single-cell flash memory in its solid-state drives, which will allow for higher performance but costs more than multicell flash memory.Single-cell flash memory stores one bit of information in each memory cell, while multicell flash memory stores two. The greater density of multicell flash makes it perfect for music players and digital cameras. But multicell flash is significantly slower, making single-cell flash more suitable for high-performance applications such as solid-state drives. Single-cell flash memory is also more durable that multicell flash. Each cell on a multicell flash chip is generally good for 10,000 write/erase cycles, while the cells on single-cell chips can last for 100,000 write/erase cycles. The durability of a flash memory chip can be increased with the use of wear leveling, a technique that writes data equally to all of the memory cells on a chip instead of using the same cells repeatedly.Drives based on magnetic platters are capable of enduring unlimited write/erase cycles, but they have moving parts which can break down. Solid-state drives do not have moving parts.STEC -- the maker of the solid-state drives that EMC plans to offer -- said its solid-state drives, which use wear leveling, last more than 2 million write/erase cycles. There was no indication of how many write/erase cycles the EMC solid-state drives will be capable of sustaining.
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(InfoWorld) - U.S. government antitrust regulators have asked Intel Corp. and STMicroelectronics NV to provide more information about theirÂ plan to spin off their flash memory unit into a new company, the vendors said Thursday. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission made the request as part of its regulatory review in an effort to ensure the deal does not violate antitrust laws, according to Intel. If FTC investigators approve the terms, Intel and ST will be able to close the deal after a 30-day waiting period, the company said. "These kinds of transactions are reviewed by the FTC and it's not unusual for them to come back and ask for more information," said Intel spokesman Tom Beermann. Intel plans to comply with the request, but gave no deadline for providing the new information. "As part of the regulatory review, they do look at antitrust issues. This is a fairly complicated deal because there are three partners and there are different types of technology, and it is a fairly large deal," Beermann said. Intel and STMicroelectronics will share ownership of the new semiconductor business with ST holding a 48.6 percent stake, Intel owning 45.1 percent and private equity firm Francisco Partners LP holding 6.3 percent. The new company will be based in Switzerland and incorporated in the Netherlands. It will compete against flash vendors including Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Toshiba Corp. and Spansion Inc. Intel's main chip rival AMD spun off its flash unit in December 2005 to create Spansion. Intel and ST announced plans for the new business in May and expect it to employ about 8,000 staff. They will make NOR and NAND-type flash chips, which are typically used for storing data in consumer and industrial products such as cell phones, MP3 music players and digital cameras. Intel has struggled for years to make a profit from its flash business, and earlier in May said it would lay off as many as 1,000 workers when it closed an outdated flash plant in New Mexico. A spokeswoman for ST said the company also planned to comply with the FTC request, but would not confirm whether it was related to antitrust concerns. "We will provide all the information they need. The FTC needs it by the second half of 2007," said ST spokeswoman Carol Brown. "This is just part of the approval process." Â
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(InfoWorld) - The European Commission has expanded anÂ ongoing antitrust probeÂ of computer chip maker Intel to examine claims that the company has been pressuring the Continent's largest computer retail chain not to sell computers containing chips made by archrival Advanced Micro DevicesÂ (AMD), Commission spokesman Jonathan Todd confirmed Monday. "The Commission is concerned that Intel has been putting pressure on Media Markt not to stock computers that include AMD chips as opposed to Intel chips," Todd said. Media Markt is a German chain of over 360 stores spread across 11 countries in the European Union. In July AMD complained to Germanyâs antitrust office, the Bundeskartellampt, that it didnât have access to this vital sales outlet. The Commission decided to examine the claim because of the cross-border nature of the alleged antitrust abuse involving Media Markt and because, if true, Intel's links with the retailer would strengthen its ongoing antitrust case, which began in 2001.
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Antitrust regulators are asking Intel and STMicroelectronics to supply them with more information about their plan to spin off their flash memory unit.
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The Federal Trade Commission has asked Google for more details about its proposed $3.1 billion purchase of online advertising company DoubleClick as part of an investigation into whether the deal raises antitrust concerns, a Google executive said yesterday.
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Intel will offer a first look at technical details of its low-power Silverthorne processor during a presentation at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week, setting the stage for a concerted push into the market for ultraportable devices.&quot;This is the&#160;first detailed technical presentation on Silverthorne,&quot; said Justin Rattner, Intel&#39;s chief technology officer and director of the company&#39;s Corporate Technology Group.Silverthorne&#160;is the first x86 chip designed by Intel specifically for small, portable computers. Until now, the company has taken older processors originally designed for notebooks and adapted them for use in portable devices. For example, Intel&#39;s existing A100 and A110 processors designed for these devices are based on the Celeron M chip.Intel&#39;s ISSCC presentation on Silverthorne was anticipated. The conference program contained a presentation abstract that described an unnamed 45-nanometer, low-power Intel processor designed for mobile Internet devices. That description is the same that Intel used to describe Silverthorne, although the company earlier declined to confirm or deny if the chip was in fact Silverthorne.Unlike other processors in Intel&#39;s current product line, Silverthorne uses an in-order processor design, akin to a factory with a single assembly line capable of processing one operation at a time. The chip is the first in-order processor released by Intel since it began shipping the Pentium Pro in 1995. Other Intel processors use an out-of-order design.Out-of-order chips work like a factory with multiple assembly lines. They can process several operations at the same time and generally offer better performance than in-order processors. Silverthorne will make up some of this difference by using Hyperthreading, a technology that allows the processor to work on two instruction threads at the same time.Using an in-order design for Silverthorne struck the best balance between performance and power efficiency, Intel said. But don&#39;t expect Silverthorne to match the performance available from Intel&#39;s mobile Core 2 processors, even though Silverthorne consumes less power. The performance of the new chips will be roughly equivalent to the Pentium M processors found in the first version of Centrino, released in 2003, Rattner said.Intel declined to comment on what clock speed Silverthorne will run at or how much power it will consume when it hits the market in the coming months. But the ISSCC program abstract said the chip will have 512KB of cache and use a 533MHz front-side bus.Observers had expected Intel to offer dual-core and single-core versions of Silverthorne, but Rattner said Silverthorne will have one core.Over the life of the Silverthorne processor, Intel expects to make a 2GHz chip available and plans to offer a version that consumes 1 watt, Intel said, suggesting these will not be features of the processors set for release in the months ahead.When Silverthorne hits the market, it could face competition from Via Technologies&#39; Isaiah processor, a low-power chip that is set for release at around the same time and is designed for the same portable devices makers that are Silverthorne&#39;s target market. Isaiah processors use an out-of-order design, a faster front-side bus, a twice as much cache, which could give the chips an edge over Silverthorne. But an accurate comparison of the two chips won&#39;t be possible until they are released and can be benchmarked by independent observers.Even if Isaiah outperforms Silverthorne, Via must still compete with Intel for orders and that may prove difficult.Via is tiny by comparison to Intel and cannot offer the same level of support to its customers in terms of marketing muscle. Via will also need to keep Isaiah&#39;s price relatively low to be competitive with Silverthorne, which is the smallest chip produced by Intel over the last 15 years or so.&quot;The 486 was a bit smaller,&quot; Rattner said.The small size of Silverthorne means Intel can produce 2,500 chips on a single 300-millimeter silicon wafer. That keeps unit production costs low and will allow Intel to sell Silverthorne at a relatively low price, as well. It also means Intel can produce Silverthorne without diverting too many manufacturing resources from its flagship Core 2 and Xeon products.&#160;
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Intel will speed servers by building in flash-memory drives beginning in 2008, Intel exec says: Less capacity, but faster communications.
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The special master appointed to hear evidence from both parties in the AMD v. Intel antitrust case has recommended that Intel be compelled to produce documents for evidence that it had previously declined to submit. If Judge Joseph A. Farnan, Jr., agrees, Intel may be asked to produce evidence of what AMD alleges to be "foreign misconduct" on Intel's part.
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Hit by turmoil in the debt capital markets, STMicroelectronics, Intel and Francisco Partners agreed to extend the deadline to launch a flash-memory joint venture to March 28.
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New York state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has launched an antitrust investigation of Intel, and on Thursday, his office served a wide-ranging subpoena on the company.Cuomo is investigating whether Intel violated state and federal antitrust laws by coercing customers to exclude its main rival, Advanced Micro Devices, from the worldwide market for PC CPUs (central processing units), Cuomo said in a news release.The subpoena seeks information on Intel&#8217;s pricing practices and possible attempts to exclude competitors through its market power, Cuomo&#39;s office said.(More to come.)
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IDF Fall '04 As Intel prepares to detail its own multi-core chips
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com. In a signal from the European Commission that it is stepping up its investigation into possible illegal business practices by Intel, the commission is asking four European countries why they
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SAN FRANCISCO - To handle the demands of the next-generation Internet, a new layer of intelligent nodes and services needs to grow over the existing Internet structure, said Intel Corp. Chief Technology Officer Pat Gelsinger, during his concluding address at the Intel Developer Forum Thursday.