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SanDisk Hurt By Weak Demand, Supply Glut
April 10, 2012 by admin
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Flash-memory maker SanDisk Corp warned that tepid demand from mobile phone manufacturers and a glut in supply that has led to lower prices are putting a dent its revenue margins.
The maker of NAND chips — used as storage memory in smartphones and tablets — has recently seen demand taper with some of its key customers scaling back orders.
Smartphones and tablets have caused a boom in NAND production, but SanDisk’s customers have not all done equally well from the explosion in mobile gadgets.
“Anybody who is not a Samsung or an Apple is burning through some (mobile) handset inventory,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Doug Freedman said.
“Until we get the PC market, tablet market and handset market back buying, we’ll see an oversupply situation.”
SanDisk’s weak outlook mirrors warnings from rival flash-memory makers, who have also blamed weak prices and demand for their disappointing results.
Late last month, Micron Technology said it was facing persistently low prices for memory chips and posted a wider loss. Toshiba Corp, Japan’s biggest chip maker, also posted a drop in quarterly sales at its electronics devices business, which includes semiconductors, hit by lower prices for memory chips.
SanDisk in January expressed concerns about weaker demand weighing on sales in the first half of this year and forecast lower-than-expected revenue for the first quarter.
The Milpitas, California-based company, which is set to report results later this month, said its gross margins for the January-March quarter will come in below its prior expectations of 39-42 percent, hurt by lower prices for its chips.
Samsung’s New Chip Line To Boost Flash Memory
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Samsung Electronics, the world’s No.1 memory chip maker, said it began mass production at a new $10 billion chip line, as it seeks to raise its profile in the booming flash memory chip market fueled by robust demand growth in mobile products.
Samsung’s new production line, its first in about five years, will help the company sharply lower production costs of the chips and could exacerbate oversupply in the market, stifling smaller rivals.
Apple Inc, the maker of popular iPhones and iPads, and Sony, which joined the crowded tablet market last month with two new devices, buy flash memory chips from Samsung.
The cost-competitive facility will make it difficult for its major customers to shift away to other suppliers.
Apple, Samsung’s biggest customer locked in a series of patent legal battles with the South Korean firm, is trying to reduce sourcing from the emerging competitor.
“The new line won’t have any immediate impact on the supply side, as it will take some nine months to fully raise capacity run rates, but it shows Samsung’s attempt to take more share in the flash chip market,” said Song Myung-sup, an analyst at HI Investment & Securities.
The First PC Had a Birthday
The year was 1981 and IBM introduced its IBM PC model 5150 on August 12th, 30 years ago today.
The first IBM PC wasn’t much by today’s standards. It had an Intel 8088 processor that ran at the blazing speed of 4.77MHz. The base memory configuration was all of 16kB expandable all the way up to 256kB, and it had two 5-1/4in, 160kB capacity floppy disk drives but no hard drive.
A keyboard and 12in monochrome monitor were included, with a colour monitor optional. The 5150 ran IBM BASIC in ROM and came with a PC-DOS boot diskette put out by a previously unknown startup software company based out of Seattle named Microsoft.
IBM priced its initial IBM PC at a whopping $1,565, and that was a relatively steep price in those days, worth about $5,000 today, give or take a few hundred dollars. In the US in 1981 that was about the cost of a decent used car.
Because the IBM PC was meant to be sold to the general public but IBM didn’t have any retail stores, the company sold it through US catalogue retailer Sears & Roebuck stores.
Subsequently IBM released follow-on models through 1986 including the PC/XT, the first with an internal hard drive; the PC/AT with an 80286 chip running at 6MHz then 8MHz; the 6MHz XT/286 with zero wait-state memory that was actually faster than the 8MHz PC/AT and (not very) Portable and Convertible models; as well as the ill-fated XT/370, AT/370, 3270 PC and 3270/AT mainframe terminal emulators, plus the unsuccessful PC Jr.
IBM Debuts Fast Storage System
IBM
With an eye toward helping tomorrow’s data intensive organizations, IBM researchers have developed a super-fast storage system capable of scanning in 10 billion files in 43 minutes.
This system easily bested their previous system, demonstrated at Supercomputing 2007, which scanned 1 billion files in three hours.
Key to the increased performance was the use of speedy flash memory to store the metadata that the storage system uses to locate requested information. Traditionally, metadata repositories reside on disk, access to which slows operations.
“If we have that data on very fast storage, then we can do those operations much more quickly,” said Bruce Hillsberg, director of storage systems at IBM Research Almaden, where the cluster was built. “Being able to use solid-state storage for metadata operations really allows us to do some of these management tasks more quickly than we could ever do if it was all on disk.”
IBM foresees that its customers will be grappling with a lot more information in the years to come.
“As customers have to store and process large amounts of data for large periods of time, they will need efficient ways of managing that data,” Hillsberg said.
For the new demonstration, IBM built a cluster of 10 eight-core servers equipped with a total of 6.8 terabytes of solid-state memory. IBM used four 3205 solid-state Storage Systems from Violin Memory. The resulting system was able to read files at a rate of almost 5 GB/s (gigabytes per second).
New MacBook Includes Faster NAND Chip
The soon to be released new version of Apple’s MacBook Air, will feature NAND flash memory with up to 400Mbps performance, about one and a half times faster than its current technology, according to a recent report.
Unlike many notebooks, the MacBook Air has no hard drive or optical drive and instead uses a slim flash board for its internal mass storage device.
Citing an “Asian electronics component company person,” the blog site Macotakara stated that Apple will use flash memory chips that includes the new Double Data Rate (DDR) 2.0 interface. While the rumors could not be confirmed, the upgrade would come as no surprise, since Apple’s next MacBook Air, which originally used Toshiba’s Blade X-gale NAND flash board, has moved to using Samsung’s flash memory. The MacBook Air’s current Samsung flash sports read rates of 261Mbps and write rates of up to 209Mbps and is based on DDR 1.0 technology.
DDR 2.0 provides a tenfold increase over the 40Mbps Single Data Rate (SDR) NAND flash in widespread use today.
In May, Samsung announced that it was producing DDR 2.0 multilevel cell flash chips. Samsung’s flash chips are made using its smallest circuitry, only 20 nanometers wide. The chips boast a performance improvement of three times over its previous technology.
DDR NAND flash comes in two forms: Toggle Mode from Samsung and Toshiba; and ONFI NAND, from the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) working group. The ONFI protocol is used by flash manufacturers, including Intel, Micron, SanDisk, Hynix and Spansion. In March, the ONFI working group announced its 3.0 specification for the DDR 2.0 interface, which also has up to 400Mbps throughput but with only half the number of pins, for a significant reduction in size.
Verizon Adds LG’s Revolution
June 1, 2011 by admin
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Verizon Wireless announced the Revolution by LG, an LTE-ready smartphone, will become available for sale in stores and online Thursday for $249.99 with a two-year service plan.
The Revolution has a 4.3-in. touch screen and 1 GHz Snapdragon processor. It utilizes the Android 2.2 mobile operating system and comes preloaded with the Netflix application for access to movies and TV shows.
Verizon called the smartphone an “entertainment powerhouse” partly due to the Netflix capability, but the Revolution also runs the Adobe Flash player, provides Dolby Mobile sound and features high-definition video recording and playback.
iPhone 5 May Debut In September
April 21, 2011 by admin
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Apple’s next-generation iPhone will have a faster processor and will start shipping in September, several sources with direct knowledge of the company’s supply chain said.
The production of the new iPhone will start in July/August and the smartphone will look very similar to the current iPhone 4, one of the sources said on Wednesday.
The iPhone -debuted in 2007 with the touchscreen, on-demand application template now adopted by its rivals- remains the gold standard in the booming smartphone market.
Reports on the timeline of the new iPhone launch vary, though it is largely expected that Apple will likely refresh its iPhone 4 later this year.
The sources declined to be identified because the plans for the new iPhone were not yet public. An Apple spokeswoman in Hong Kong was not available for comment.
The iPhone is one of Apple’s most successful products, with more than 16 million sold in the last quarter of 2010 and the product accounted for more than a third of the company’s sales in the quarter.
The current iPhone 4 was launched by Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs in June last year and began shipping the same month in 2010.
Seagate To Acquire Samsung’s HD Unit
April 20, 2011 by admin
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Seagate Technology is to acquire Samsung Electronics loss-plagued hard disk drive (HDD) business for $1.4 billion as it looks to battle rival Western Digital Corp and curb price wars that continue to damage the industry.
The deal comes a month after Western Digital sought to buy Hitachi Ltd’s hard disk drive division for $4.3 billion, to create a global leader with deep resources.
It is yet to be seen whether Western Digital trump Seagate as the world’s largest hard drive maker after the deals conclude. In 2010, Seagate’s sales was $11.4 billion while Western Digital posted revenue of $9.85 billion.
Toshiba Corp and Fujitsu are the other smaller players in the hard-drive space.
The sale of the HDD business will see Samsung leave the cut-rate industry and focus on its bread-and-butter memory-chip business.
The sector is already battling persistent sales-growth declines and now faces a longer-term threat from wireless tablet devices using more power-efficient flash drives, or solid-state drives (SSD).
DRAM Prices Going Up
iSuppli is reporting that global chip revenue should increase to $325.2 due to supply and demand. Two months ago iSuppli originally forecasted a 5.8 percent increase to $320.1 billion. Apparently, DRAM chips will be impacted the most with a price increase due to supply issues as a result of the recent earthquake in Japan. iSuppli had originally forecasted sales of DRAM chips to shrink by four percent this year instead of seeing a drop of 10.6 percent.
Dell To Unleash Microservers
Dell is apparently in the process to debut two new microservers that are equipped with low-power consumption efficient processors from AMD and Intel.Representatives from Dell stated that the PowerEdge C5125 and C5220 were built for businesses that want to set up cloud computing infrastructures. Dell’s Barton George wrote in his blog that the C5125 will utilize AMD processors and will ship next month and the C5220 which will have an Intel processor will ship in May. The PowerEdge eco-friendly servers will have a dense 3U infrastructure that has 12 one-socket servers that can be used for running one application. These types of servers use four times less rack space and cabling which makes data centers more efficient.