AMD&#39;s Spansion unveils new flash memory products
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Spansion LLC, the flash memory joint venture between Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) and Fujitsu Ltd., unveiled two products that introduce a new design into Spansion&#39;s lineup and expand the density of its current products, the company said Tuesday.
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Traxdata presenta &quot;CompactFlash Pro&quot; da 4 GB, la nuova scheda di memoria ad alta capacitÃ  per macchine fotografiche e videocamere digitali. Oltre all&#39;elevata quantitÃ  di dati archiviabili, con circa 2000
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An innovative new memory technology that promises to replace flash in a wide range of products has been unveiled by IBM and two partners who claim their phase-change technology is 500 times faster than flash and draws roughly half the power.
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(InfoWorld) - AMD on Monday is giving the public an advanced look at how its pending quad-core chip will improve performance and save energy. AMD, playing catch-up to rival Intel, whoseÂ quad-core XeonÂ product launched in 2006, will discuss features of its quad-core product, code-named Barcelona, at the International Solid States Circuits Conference in San Francisco, a forum for engineers in solid state circuitry and system-on-a-chip processor design. AMD says it will present details at the conference of how Barcelona, due to be released in mid-2007, improves performance and energy efficiency over the competition and over its own dual-core processor, the Opteron, which it introduced in 2003. Barcelona will feature "Enhanced PowerNow" technology, which will dynamically adjust core frequencies as workloads change in order to power down cores when not needed to save energy, said Brent Kerby, product marketing manager for Opteron. Under the PowerNow technology already deployed in the dual-core Opteron, the OS delivers the needed power to the busiest core, but if the other core is not as busy, it will still receive the voltage demanded of the busiest core, Kerby said. But with Enhanced PowerNow, while the busiest core will receive the power it needs, the OS will reduce the frequency and voltage of the remaining cores because they aren't as busy. "We still see power savings with our current PowerNow technology, but it's going to get better with Barcelona because we're going to be able to dynamically and independently adjust the core frequencies of each individual core," he said. Also in Barcelona, the OS will directly communicate with the CPU instead of first going through the CPU driver, a more efficient approach, he said. "With Barcelona, there is no CPU driver middleman. The OS can tell the processor directly, 'Hey this is how much work I'm doing,' and the Barcelona core will determine when the best time is to make that change. It's not doing it blindly," he said. Barcelona also separates the power management of the cores from that of the memory controller, which is embedded in AMD-designed processors. That way, frequency and voltage can be reduced to the cores when they are not busy and increased to the memory controller when it is busy, and vice versa. AMD claims an 80 percent reduction in memory controller power usage with this design change. Barcelona will also feature enhanced clock-gating, which means core logic circuits can be turned on or off to save power. Like settings on a coffee grinder, the chip can do "coarse" or "fine" clock gating, shutting down increasingly finer sections of core logic as needed. AMD claims that Barcelona can deliver a 40 percent improvement in performance over "the competition." While not mentioning Intel's Xeon specifically, AMD has long pointed out that its quad-core chip will be four cores designed on the same piece of silicon, while Intel's design is two dual-core processors packaged together.
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(InfoWorld) - Flash memory and hard-disk drives could face a challenge from a new chip technology, dubbed phase-change memory, being developed by a group of companies led by IBM. The companies on Monday announced the results of their latest research into the technology, which they say will do a better job of storing songs, pictures, and other data on iPods and digital cameras than current flash memory, and could someday replace disk drives. Among the advances, the companies have built a prototype device that runs 500 times faster than today's flash memory while using half as much power to write data to a memory cell, they said. The circuits on the device are much smaller than those on today's flash chips, measuring just 3 by 20 nanometers, and show that, unlike flash, phase-change memory will be suitable for production on the advanced manufacturing techniques targeted for use in 2015, the companies said. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. The progress came partly from the development of a new material to build the memory chips, a germanium alloy to which the researchers added other elements to enhance its properties. The companies have applied for a patent for the material, they said. Besides IBM, the developers include Qimonda, the DRAM spin-off from Infineon Technologies, and Taiwan's Macronix International Co. They plan to discuss their findings at the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineer's 2006 International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco later this week. It's the kind of breakthrough that people look forward to in the IT industry, although end users will have to be patient before it finds its way into products. It could take several more years for the technology to be developed sufficiently for use in finished products. Still, phase-change memory appears promising. The chips would be a new type of non-volatile memory, which is memory that can hold its electrical charge -- and its data -- after devices are turned off. Flash is also non-volatile, but phase-change memory can hold its electrical charge better than flash and use it more efficiently, its backers say. Flash also faces a roadblock in the future. As engineers make chip circuits more tiny, the circuits leak more power and ultimately lose their ability to store data after being turned off. The size limit appears to be around 45nm, although it will still be years before the flash industry starts using such tiny production technologies. Phase-change memory can be scaled down to 22nm, or far smaller than flash memory, the researchers developing it say. It also appears able to be more durable than flash, whose memory cells start to break down after 100,000 rewrites. While its prospects appear bright, the technology faces several hurdles. New chip designs must be relatively easy to manufacture, and they need to be cost-effective enough to attract device makers. RambusÂ faced this issue when its chips failed to overtake DRAM as the main memory type for PCs several years ago, despite having the backing of Intel. The problem, some companies said, is that the chips was were too costly to produce -- although Rambus vehemently disagrees with this. IBM has posted photos of the phase-change devices here, and some animation clips here.
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SanDisk on Tuesday announced new flash memory cards with higher capacities, designed to fit into consumer gizmos like digital cameras, camcorders and cell phones.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro DevicesÂ (AMD) said Friday it wouldÂ begin shipping its "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron processorÂ in August, rebutting industry rumors that the chip faced manufacturing problems that could delay it until October. Although AMD has already lined up hardware partners like Sun MicrosystemsÂ to use the chip in high-end servers, some analysts had predicted that a delayed release could cause AMD toÂ lose business to Intel. However, AMD insists it is on schedule to produce both standard and low-wattage SE (special edition) versions of Barcelona, in a range of frequencies up to 2.0GHz. The new Barcelona chips will generate the same amount of heat as current Opteron chips, but improve computing performance by 70 percent for database applications or 40 percent for floating point jobs, Allen said. Future versions of both types will run at even higher speeds, allowing customers to further improve their energy efficiency, said Randy Allen, corporate vice president of AMD's server and workstation division. Intel competes for those same customers today with the dual-core Woodcrest and quad-core Clovertown Xeon processorsÂ launched last year, and plans to up the ante in the fourth quarter of 2007 with quad-core "Harpertown" server chip using smaller, 45-nanometer scale components. AMD will begin shipping Barcelona chips for sale in August, and expects server vendors to ship commercial products using the chip by September. AMD hopes those new servers are popular enough to help reverse a slide in market share and revenue in recent months. The company has posted losses of hundreds of millions of dollars for the past two quarters as it struggles to survive aÂ price war with Intel. Â
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InfoWorld - Seven of the world&#39;s top mobile phone technology companies are backing the development of a new flash memory standard to be used in mobile phones, digital cameras and other consumer electronics devices.
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Apple continued its trend towards flash memory on Tuesday, announcing two new models of both the iPhone and iPod Touch with additional capacity.
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With an eye on gaining a stronger foothold in the wireless market, Intel has launched new flash memory software, along with a developer toolset, to speed the design and deployment of applications for next-generation multimedia phones.
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A new type of memory could soon be available to device makers.
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New cards provide more memory for cameras, cell phones and other consumer devices.
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SUNNYVALE, Calif. - Spansion LLC, the flash memory joint venture of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) and Fujitsu Ltd., is mass producing a 512-Mbit NOR flash memory based on two-bit per cell technology called MirrorBit, AMD said Tuesday (Nov. 2).
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Preps pair of Octals Entire computing platforms have come and gone* in the time that it has taken AMD to shove the four-core version of Opteron known as Barcelona into end customers' hands.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro DevicesÂ has announced three new discrete media chips to respond to growing demand for advanced multimedia features in mobile phones. The AMD Imageon 2298, 2294 and 2192 processors, unveiled Monday at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, are designed with a number of media-rich features, including processing of images up to 12 megapixels, image stabilization, and multichannel audio playback. AMD will be licensing the technology to other chip manufacturers, including STMicroelectronics, according to AMD marketing director Andy Thompson. The media processor is separate from the phone's core processor, enabling manufacturers to introduce new multimedia functions more quickly, according to Thompson. The separate architecture also helps reduce power consumption for longer device battery life. The new media chips will support full DVD resolutions or "five times what was available in earlier generations," said AMD product manager Philippe Decotignie. "Consumers can turn their phones into camcoders and mobile TVs with a very high, very fast resolution," he said. In addition, the chips will support simultaneous audio and video encoding and decoding, acoustic echo cancellation and video stabilization. Their TV output function allows viewing of videos and photos on any TV or projector. Several handset manufacturers are currently testing the new media chips. AMD has supplied earlier-generation media chips to a number of mobile phone makers, including Motorola and Samsung Electronics. The 3GSM World Congress runs through Thursday.
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Flash memory chip maker Spansion has sharpened its focus on China, revamping management in the Asia Pacific region and striking a deal to farm out some chip production to Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC).Spansion, originally a joint venture between Advanced Micro Devices&#160;and Fujitsu before it&#160;went public, provides NOR flash memory and its own MirrorBit flash chips to the mobile phone market.The changes in management structure and the SMIC deal are designed to boost Spansion&#39;s sales in China&#39;s mobile phone and consumer electronics markets. The management changes include the creation of a new position, president for the Greater China area, which usually includes China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.Several multinationals have increased their focus on China&#39;s mobile phone market in recent years. Research In Motion said Tuesday its popular&#160;BlackBerry handsets will soon be sold in China, an announcement that sent its stock soaring 9.8 percent on the Nasdaq Stock Market to $124.53 per share, despite the fact that most Chinese buy low-cost mobile phones.Last month, Hewlett-Packard, the biggest PC vendor, said it&#160;won a license from the Chinese government to sell more smartphone models&#160;in the country. It&#39;s currently allowed to sell only one smartphone, the hp6515 iPaq.The companies are being lured by China&#39;s rapid growth. It boasted 516 million mobile phone subscribers at the end of August, according to the Ministry of Information Industry of the People&#39;s Republic of China. The world&#39;s largest mobile phone company, China Mobile Communications, counted 350 million subscribers at of the end of September. No other country comes close to those numbers.The U.S. mobile population is at around 246 million, according to the CTIA, while India, which has a population nearly as big as China&#39;s, had 209 million mobile phone users as of the end of September, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.Spansion&#39;s new Greater China president, Gary Wang, will work with customers, government officials and partners to focus Spansion&#39;s business strategies to the requirements of the China market, the company said.Spansion had 2006 full-year sales of $2.6 billion.The agreement with SMIC will allow Spansion to have its MirrorBit flash memory products produced on 12-inch silicon wafers in China, which help reduce costs. The companies expect the deal to help Spansion sell flash chips to Chinese consumer electronics manufacturers.Spansion began outsourcing production of some of its chips to SMIC&#39;s rival, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) last year, but TSMC does not offer production on 12-inch wafers in China. Taiwanese investment regulations prohibit TSMC from producing chips on 12-inch wafers in China. Spansion will continue to contract some manufacturing to TSMC.SMIC will also be able to manufacture and sell MirrorBit Quad chip products to certain markets in China, according to a memorandum of understanding, Spansion said.REFERENCES:HP wins license to sell more smartphones in China, Sep. 13, 2007First BlackBerry comes to China, with Alcatel-Lucent&#39;s help, Oct. 24, 2007
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Rambus, the memory chip technology developer, is looking to the future world of multimedia as the way for its XDR memory chips to find their way into more mainstream products.The memory technology is currently used mainly in game consoles, but Japanese DRAM (dynamic RAM) maker Elpida Memory unveiled a speedy DRAM chip based on XDR technology, the 512Mb, 4.8GHz XDR DRAM. The chips are aimed at game consoles, HDTVs (high-definition televisions), PCs, servers and workstations.But one knock against the company is that while its products may be used in some high end applications, they have not trickled down into the mainstream because they cost too much compared to DDR2 (double date, second generation) DRAM and other technologies. Regardless, Rambus CEO Harold Hughes, sees 2008 as a breakout year for Rambus technology to enter higher volume production as it wins over some HDTV clients.He said people should also be on the lookout for XDR technology to make some headway into cellular phones and other mobile devices.Hughes was in Taipei for the Rambus Developer Forum, and discussed new products in an interview with IDG News Service (IDGNS).IDGNS: What are the major product areas Rambus will focus on in the next year for its XDR memory technology?Harold Hughes: I think 2008 will see a few big [technology trends] moving forward in computers, HDTVs and the game players, and some of the neatest stuff will come out on cell phones. Those are four markets where Rambus is well positioned, so we hope to have a great year.IDGNS: What is Rambus working on in the mobile market? Handsets, ultramobile PCs?Hughes: Consumers want everything that they have on a desktop in one of these things (he holds up an iPhone) and obviously the bandwidth requirements are very, very high relative to what used to be the case for a simple little phone, and all that needs to be supplied at incredibly low power. Well, we&#39;ve made what I think are some astonishing breakthroughs in low-power technology that are in many cases as much as 80 percent over existing technology. In applications where you&#39;re using full motion videos (TV on mobile phones) much lower power with full motion videos.We&#39;re looking forward to making our mark in the low-power and mobile market. Our approach will be to use the bandwidth cores available with XDR, but to use our very low power interfaces to drive those, and to do that not only through our suppliers but also to look to some of the major players in the cell phone industry to bring them to market in 2008 or 2009. It most likely won&#39;t be XDR as we know it, but it might be derived from XDR. It has to be high bandwidth and extremely low power and it has to have low packaging cost.IDGNS: Can you give an idea of what you mean by low power?Hughes: We have introduced some very interesting low-power technology. We put out a [research paper] and we showed that we could deliver 2.2Gbps at 100 milliwatts. Mind-bogglingly low, 2.2 milliwatts per gigabit per second. We could run it off two-double AA batteries. The joke we was that we would try to get it to run off of a potato. We passed 3,600 terabits of data through our interface with two-AA batteries, which is the equivalent of 100 DVDs.IDGNS: Why do you think XDR fits the HDTV market?The XDR products are doing very well in the gaming products and we&#39;ll talk about the HDTV market. It&#39;s truly amazing the kind of compute requirements there, but it&#39;s also a consumer electronics product so it&#39;s got all the issues of cost and it&#39;s also the size, the electronic migration, the fans and stuff, so it&#39;s really bandwidth per device, and that&#39;s where XDR really stands out, in bandwidth per device. Such that with one or two XDR devices, you can get adequate to deal with the 5-10Gbps of bandwidth these televisions are using. That&#39;s where working with companies like Elpida and other licensees we can have an adequate supply of XDR so we can do great things in the HDTV market.IDGNS: What PC trends will help push more Rambus memory into PCs?Hughes: The new generation of computers is going to have these multiple core processors, which are just driving incredibly attractive and interesting PCs. What&#39;s interesting is the nature of the cores. They are not only standard compute cores, but they are also graphics cores. For us, we&#39;re very happy on multiple levels. That&#39;s going to produce a greater need for memory bandwidth. In particular, the multi-core processors that have compute and graphics have conflicting needs insofar as the memory architecture is concerned. The computing requires capacity and graphics requires bandwidth. Rambus has a product called the XDR which offers multiple gigabytes of capacity and quite remarkable bandwidth, and in fact Elpida has productized a 4.8GHz part, so that&#39;s a pretty speedy product.IDGNS: Rambus appears to be doing well in products at the top-end of the market, such as game consoles, but how is the company working to target the mainstream and lower-cost markets?Keep in mind that we believe that embedded in DDR2 is no small part of Rambus technology and that unfortunately is the subject of lots of litigation and there&#39;s no indication that&#39;s going to stop in the near future. I think that&#39;s always inevitable with our business model. I think that&#39;s almost inevitable given our business model, putting aside the litigation aspects of it. For a 400-person company to have impact and for IP to have value, you must solve problems well out into the future. Those problems are only going to be usable initially be a relatively small subset, but as that then starts to proliferate through more supply and costs come down, then you see those products trickle down to the $200 laptop.I don&#39;t see that that model is going to change. We are working on memories that have truly staggering performance. Initially those will probably be actual parts incorporating as many of our features as possible, but by definition because of their performance there will be a limited number of applications that need it, but X number of years later, not only will those discrete parts become cheaper and likely migrate into higher volumes, but the ingredients in those parts are very likely to go into very low-performance, low-cost applications that are used widely.IDGNS: What else do you see for 2008 that&#39;s big?Hughes: Games will improve dramatically. The software development kits are continuing to improve such that I think games will be able to take advantage of more of the cycles. You know how they CAT scan a brain when its thinking? Well I suspect if they were to do the same thing with a cell processor on current games, it would show that a lot of those transistors aren&#39;t being turned on, especially when you&#39;re using an abstracted development code.Ultimately [game developers] will learn how to directly address hardware more and more and I think you&#39;ll see those games coming out more in 2008 and they&#39;ll probably be spectacular, frankly. Of course, I&#39;ve given up on games. Competing with your son is, well it&#39;s so humiliating. You&#39;re getting killed in a game and you don&#39;t even know what&#39;s going on.