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

To: etchmeister who wrote (139363)	11/10/2004 3:09:27 PM
From: dougSF30	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Looks to me like Samsung is reacting to the Spansion ORNAND announcements.

To: etchmeister who wrote (139363)	11/10/2004 3:50:47 PM
From: Paranoid	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

I wonder if AMD announced ORNAND before Friday, to preempt the Samsung oneNAND announcement or Samsung is reacting to ORNAND.

To: etchmeister who wrote (139363)	11/10/2004 4:36:57 PM
From: Petz	Respond to of 275872

A few points: 1. ONENand is nothing new - "OneNAND flash was introduced in 2003" 2. Its not the same thing as ORNAND - "The single chip is based on NAND architecture with integrated buffer memory and logic interfaces." Also, from the original announcement of the 512M bit version in March - "The integration of a high performance NAND controller, NOR Flash interface, SLC NAND Flash array, and up to 5KB of internal Buffer-RAM on a single die enables OneNAND Flash to achieve sustained read performance of 31MB/s and program performance up to 7MB/s." So, it is unlikely to have the same performance characteristics as AMD's device, and it is unlikely to be as cheap as standard NAND. AMD's device is based on NOR cells, Samsung's is based on NAND cells. How does power consumption compare? For reads? For writes? Is writing as flexible with OneNand as ORNAND? How do write speeds compare? 3. ONENand is 1 bit per cell, ORNAND is 2, with future, 4. So its WRONG to conclude that AMD just announced this to preempt Samsung. Samsung announced this in March: samsung.com This is just a new density, admittedly 2x as big as anything AMD has in NOR at the moment. Sorry for redundancy, I was reacting to the original post about ONENand. Petz

To: etchmeister who wrote (139363)	11/10/2004 5:49:12 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Re: Placing two 1-Gbit OneNAND flash and one mobile SDRAM in a three-chip MCP Well, if you need 256MB of storage, then the additional expense of interconnects between the 2 Flash chips and the DRAM chip don't add all that much to costs. OTOH, there is also testing, and the fact that a problem with any of the 3 chips or any of the interconnects will probably make the whole module unuseable. AMD's solution is far more elegant and should be less expensive to produce. Flash that acts like memory instead of disk or tape is nice stuff. Note that OneNAND still acts as as serial device and still requires something that can act as RAM. AMD's solution is RAM that acts as its own storage. Samsung's solution has some problems since they're going with SDRAM for working storage. SDRAM uses more power and requires a refresh controller. To have 256MB available from OneNAND you need 256MB of NAND, 256MB of SDRAM, and a DRAM controller (likely integrated into the chip) and you have to manage data transfers between the two. SDRAM also uses power while it's holding stored data. AMD's solution is to just have 256MB of FLASH that functions as both storage and SRAM. AMD's Mirrorbit is (I believe) more expensive to produce than Samsung's OneNAND but you don't need SDRAM, an SDRAM controller, or to worry about designing management hardware to handle the added complexity. A Mirrorbit solution should use quite a bit less power, too. There will be a lot of cases where Mirrorbit is a better choice - and AMD will be able to charge more for Mirrorbit since it eliminates DRAM costs, uses less power, and reduces design costs. Each technology will have its place. I doubt either one will crush the other. Samsung's advantage will be that it's cheap - but it had better be cheap, and there will be cases where a $20 easy-to-design-in low power Mirrorbit chip will win compared to a $5 difficult-to-design-in higher power OneNAND solution.