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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ramsey Su who wrote (22691)	8/8/1998 11:39:00 AM
From: TI2, TechInvestorToo	Respond to of 70976

Main frames and network servers (etc) also use these chips although the packaging may be different. Some years back when IBM went commercial with their DRAMS, they solved the problem of their unique chip layout by creating a package which compensated for their bonding pad layout. TI2

To: Ramsey Su who wrote (22691)	8/9/1998 10:28:00 AM
From: Katherine Derbyshire	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Part of the confusion is because DRAMs are manufactured in units of megabits (1 bit = 1 binary digit, or 1 physical cell), but PC memory is sold in units of megabytes (1 byte = 1 machine word = 8 bits for PCs). So, a PC with 32 megabytes of main memory (about standard these days) uses 256 megabits of DRAMs (= 16 16M chips, or 4 64M chips) So, 32 million 64M units is enough to equip 32 million PCs at 8mbytes each 8 million PCs at 32Mbytes each 2 million PCs at 128Mbytes each I recently did some PC shopping, and the "standard" seems to be 32megabytes or so. That's enough for the "average" user--business applications and the Internet--so most systems probably aren't upgraded. I wasn't able to find good data re: the fraction of DRAMs used for PCs versus other applications. PCs are the largest single application, but I don't think they consume a majority of the chips. Especially as memory has gotten cheaper, non-PC devices have gotten "smarter". Katherine