AMD&#39;s Spansion unveils new flash memory products
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Spansion, the flash memory joint venture between Advanced Micro Devices and Fujitsu, 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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SanDisk this week announced a series of CF (CompactFlash) cards that double the read and write speeds of its fastest flash cards available today, as well as an 8GB version of its Ultra II CF Type 1 flash memory card.
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ACCORDING TO MARKET watchers, iSuppli, in Q1-Q2 2004 Spansion (AMD/Fujitsu) remained Number One mobile phone flash memory supplier, a position it first stole from Intel in 2003.
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A new type of flash memory that will speed access to data stored on memory cards and mobile devices has received the support of several major phone and memory vendors.
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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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Flash memory stick makers are showing off USB (Universal Serial Bus) drives at Computex that have been certified to work with Windows Vista&#39;s ReadyBoot and ReadyBoost functions, which improve boot-up times and the software start-up speeds in PCs.
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The company plans to present a paper this week outlining a new type of memory that could help boost processor performance.
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Blog: Flash memory companies will be scrambling to fill orders the rest of this year with 25 percent of NAND capacity allocated to Apple, according to a market research firm.
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LONDON - The mobile phone market for flash memory is becoming more competitive with the intense fight among NOR-type flash makers now expanding to include NAND-type flash producers, market researchers iSuppli Corp.
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Samsung unveils chip that can be used to create 64GB flash memory cards.
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com. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. announced a line of flash-memory cards that are smaller than a thumbnail, as the firm said it had defeated the nagging problem of high power consumption.
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Photo flash memory leader focuses on the masses.
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(InfoWorld) - AMD hopes to seize a larger share of the server chip market fromÂ its rival IntelÂ on Monday when it launches the Barcelona quad-core processor. AMD has been shipping the Quad-Core AMD Opteron chip to server vendors throughout August but will use its news conference in San Francisco to publicly announce those partnerships as well as prices and benchmark test results. The company plans to launch a 1.9GHz, 68-watt Barcelona chip that focuses on power efficiency, and a 2.0GHz, 95-watt version that focuses on price/performance, said Randy Allen, AMD's corporate vice president for the server and workstation division. In the fourth quarter, the company will follow that with a 2.3 GHz, 120-watt version for high-performance applications, and higher clock speeds for the first two chips. There is a lot at stake. After launching the original Opteron chip in 2003, the company enjoyed brisk demand as customers applauded the power-efficient performance of that 130-nanometer design process chip. But Intel soon got back in the fight as both companies built smaller, faster components, shrinking their chip scales to 90nm and adding a second core. AMD has endured disappointing results lately,Â posting losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars for recent quartersÂ and focusing its attention onÂ a merger with graphics chip maker ATI. At the same time, Intel claimed bragging rights to beating AMD to quad-core architecture andÂ 65nm scale chips with its ClovertownÂ server chip.Â Intel is also preparing to launch an even smaller-featured design in the fourth quarter with its 45nm Penryn chip. AMD says Barcelona is the answer to the Intel challenge. The chip is designed with all four cores on a single die as opposed to Intel's design of joining two dual-core Woodcrest Xeon chips, Allen said. Even more important, AMD upgraded each core from 64-bit floating point performance to 128-bit and retained its Direct Connect architecture and on-chip memory controller to avoid bottlenecks in data flow, he said. Thanks to that design, the new chip will provide better performance while using the same amount of power, he said. A customer could upgrade a Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL 385 server from AMD's dual-core to quad-core Opteron and gain faster operation with the same power and cooling demands. "Clovertown will look very anemic, especially as we bring out new frequencies. Customers really don't buy nanometers. What they care about is performance and benchmarking," said Allen. "That Direct Connect architecture is very helpful with virtualization, running multiple OSes, and other applications pulling more data than can be held in on-chip memory." Despite those advantages, AMD has missed out on a spike in market demand driven by a need to upgrade to servers capable of performing virtualization, one analyst said. "A lot of people view this as six months late or more," said Doug Freedman, managing director for research at American Technology Research. "Expectations got ahead of themselves, and some people viewed this as a potential savior for AMD after their server share topped out at the end of last year going up against Intel's dual-die quad-core. Now the feeling is this launch isn't robust enough in terms of samples shipped, design wins, and the complete food chain." To recover, AMD will have to quickly increase its production and release faster versions of Barcelona to improve the chip's availability for a range of applications, Freedman said. Intel executives say they are pressing the lead. "We are very confident, at least on the DP [dual processor] side, that we will have leadership across most of the benchmarks versus Barcelona," said Adesh Gupta, regional platform architecture manager at Intel Asia-Pacific's Server Platforms Group. "There are a small percentage of benchmarks which are floating-point based where we know that they have an advantage and that's an area which we will see them talk about a lot.... If you look at the broader spectrum of applications at the enterprise, we have a significant lead today, and we believe we will have that lead with Clovertown, and once we have Harpertown with 45nm we will extend that lead further," Gupta said. However, some vendors say there is room in the market for both chips. Each processor has its own strengths, said Dell CEO Michael Dell in remarks to financial analysts at the Citigroup Technology Conference in New York on Wednesday. Based on early tests, Dell said, a server using Barcelona chips is faster at running floating-point applications than a computer with Intel's Clovertown chips, but Clovertown is faster than Barcelona at running integer instructions. "So depending on the applications you run, or your theories of computer science, one of those servers may be the best for you. It is simply unacceptable for a company of Dell's size to have only one of those choices," Dell said.
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Mtron is launched new solid-state disk drives later this year with 120M Bps read and 90M bps write speed performance.
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) plans to develop flash memory chips that blend the best characteristics of the two dominant flash memory architectures, the company announced.
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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.
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A CALIFORNIAN vendor of flash cards SanDisk has released new memory cards that they say will make a big splash in consumer gizmos like digital cameras and cell phones.