Let the games begin:
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscent..._20nm_flash_memory_could_spark_price_war.html
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscent..._20nm_flash_memory_could_spark_price_war.html
SSD price war anyone?
- Thread starter John24
- Start date
Caporegime
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 33,188
Yup, the biggest problem was the recession, some of the smaller processes were due a while ago and several big fabs were due to be built to increase manufacturing capacity, but reduced spending and reduced cashflow meant the fabs weren't expanded/built and things didn't take off as fast as they should.
Samsung are a very interesting company right now, they released a statement a few months ago that they want to expand their IC making fabs massively in the next 5 years and want to be competing properly on scale with TSMC within 5-10 years. Its a massive commitment to expansion into the manufacturing field and flash memory is probably one of their biggest area's to expand into at the moment.
They want to compete, as I understand for things that Global foundries and TSMC produce/will produce, but Global Foundries, essentially AMD's old manufacturing arm, had sold off their flash production company a couple years back so its one area Samsung has to move into that their main competitor Global Foundries, might not be too big into.
Basically its just good news for us, Samsung want to throw money at manufacturing and the time is right for them to ramp up SSD chip making hugely.
The other good thing is those people trying to break a market, charge less than those who dominate, AMD/Intel cpu's. A better example is Acer vs Dell, Acer have been selling incredibly competitively priced computers to gain market share, they'll happily undercut Dell to get sales. We'll probably see Samsung do the same to increase their share of the SSD market.
One thing to bear in mind is manufacturing quality, 20/25nm sound hugely different on paper, in reality theres so many tweaks and tricks to manufacturing and so many methods, something "called" 25nm but ultra expensive high quality with every trick in the trade in it could easily produce a smaller chip than a "cheap" 20nm which took all the cheap options. The size generally refers to transistor size, but worse insulation and worse quality production and each transistor will be further apart than a better quality 25nm.
So its not necessarily better, but competition is certainly good.
Samsung are a very interesting company right now, they released a statement a few months ago that they want to expand their IC making fabs massively in the next 5 years and want to be competing properly on scale with TSMC within 5-10 years. Its a massive commitment to expansion into the manufacturing field and flash memory is probably one of their biggest area's to expand into at the moment.
They want to compete, as I understand for things that Global foundries and TSMC produce/will produce, but Global Foundries, essentially AMD's old manufacturing arm, had sold off their flash production company a couple years back so its one area Samsung has to move into that their main competitor Global Foundries, might not be too big into.
Basically its just good news for us, Samsung want to throw money at manufacturing and the time is right for them to ramp up SSD chip making hugely.
The other good thing is those people trying to break a market, charge less than those who dominate, AMD/Intel cpu's. A better example is Acer vs Dell, Acer have been selling incredibly competitively priced computers to gain market share, they'll happily undercut Dell to get sales. We'll probably see Samsung do the same to increase their share of the SSD market.
One thing to bear in mind is manufacturing quality, 20/25nm sound hugely different on paper, in reality theres so many tweaks and tricks to manufacturing and so many methods, something "called" 25nm but ultra expensive high quality with every trick in the trade in it could easily produce a smaller chip than a "cheap" 20nm which took all the cheap options. The size generally refers to transistor size, but worse insulation and worse quality production and each transistor will be further apart than a better quality 25nm.
So its not necessarily better, but competition is certainly good.
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