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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (34971)	4/5/2001 8:43:43 AM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 275872

"what devices AMD's flash are used in" Well, you probably know about the contracts that have been signed. AMD flash has a big following in the automotive sector because of the high temp. specification. I know it gets used for handhelds in freezer use for the low temp. specs. I suspect that a fair percentage of the MP3 players use it for speed reasons, by executing in place, they can cut down on the amount of RAM required. The bulk of the flash for an MP3 player would likely be NAND or possibly Intel StrataFlash for cost reasons. As long as board real estate is not at a premium, OEMs can get around specifying AMD flash for speed by copying everything to RAM at boot time. Another place where it would be used is when the OEM needs to update the contents frequently. The faster write speed can make a big difference if you have to update 16 megabytes or more all in one chunk. That can take a minute or so with StrataFlash. The only other competitor that I am really aware of for fast flash is SSTI, but they can have quality problems in my experience. Micron flash isn't bad. Yeah, Sandisk does have competition for their MMCs. But Sandisk has a good name, they don't get a big premium for that and they supply good support for designers. This helps their position a lot. Ok, the code they supply could be drastically improved...