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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gary Kao who wrote (97940)	1/31/2000 5:43:00 PM
From: blrmkr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Gary- (1) Intel's flash products are all based on a flash microarchitecture which is more typical of a "regular" memory array. Supply an address, decode the byte/word at that address and spit it out. This action can be done at bus cycle speeds, and all addresses are occur through a memory mapped interface. In the industry, this flash architecture is commonly referred to as "NOR" flash. The big players in this market are Intel, AMD, Fujitsu, and Sharp, among others. The other main type of flash ("NAND" flash) is more of a sector read where an address is supplied and a whole chunk of memory is read internally (256 or 512 bytes + ECC). Relatively, it takes a long time to get the chunk, but on a per byte basis the read speed isn't too bad. Reading a huge chunk of code with a long latency isn't typically conducive to execute-in-place environments like cell phones. (2) All I know about this is that one of your original points about Intel selling their card business is correct. (3) No opinion there. Digital cameras seem to be getting much more popular so I believe that market will continue to grow. MP3 is also very interesting and a high growth area. I personally find the cell phone market the most intriguing, however. 3G cellular is very dependent on high performance flash and lots of it. Is ATML's recent price drop warranted? Well they still trade at a trailing P/E of 80 or so, which is pretty rich. I actually think they've held up pretty nicely given that. I think ATML's hidden gem is their diversification into SiGe and other RF activities which are key to the wireless market. A booming flash market can't hurt either. Yes, I hope their growth prospects (and valuation) approach that of companies like RFMD... :) blrmkr