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To: etchmeister who wrote (28034)	1/23/2006 1:33:25 AM
From: etchmeister	Respond to of 95546

RE: Just a quick macroeconomic review here: What does "price elasticity" mean again? Surge in NAND applications as prices drop by David Manners Friday 20 January 2006 With the cost of NAND flash declining at 40 per cent a year, new applications are opening up, particularly in computing. Later this year, hard discs with a flash cache will be sold to coincide with the launch of Microsoft’s new operating system Vista. “The theory is that the hard disc doesn’t have to run all the time,” Richard Walsh,... Article Continues Below ... senior memory manager for Samsung in Europe, told Electronics Weekly. “Flash-based cache can reduce the number of reads to the hard disc and eliminate a lot of writes,” he added. Vista has been tailored to cope with hard discs incorporating a flash-based cache referred to as hybrid discs. “Data is transferred from flash memory to the hard drive opportunistically, when the flash memory is full, or when the system activates the hard drive to access or read other data,” Microsoft’s Mui Luc told EW. “This approach means the hard drive can be kept still for a large percentage of the time, ultimately requiring less power and extending overall system battery life.” Estimates suggest that hybrid discs will save over half an hour of battery life and reduce boot-up times to a few seconds. This year Samsung launches 8Gbit NAND flash, next year 16Gbit and, in 2008, it is expected to introduce 32Gbit. “It opens the door to what you can do. Every 15 months you get double the memory for the same price. It opens up lots of applications,” said Walsh. As well as inside cellphones, NAND flash is increasingly being used as removable storage in cellphones. “In 2005, 20 per cent of phones shipped with a card slot. We expect that to be 28 per cent in 2006,” said Walsh. Related Articles * ST moves NAND flash to 90nm * Rambus claims first phase win in Hynix trial * Seeing blue in the Blu-ray/HD DVD wars * Micron makes progress in face of DRAM price pressure * Seagate acquires Maxtor in storage industry consolidation