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Fujitsu, AMD to boost flash memory production
By Stephanie Miles
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
May 23, 2000, 8:50 a.m. PT
update Fujitsu and Advanced Micro Devices said today they plan to construct a plant to manufacture flash memory chips for increasingly popular devices such as cell phones and Internet appliances.

Flash memory is used to store data in some of the most popular consumer electronics products, including cell phones, digital cameras, handheld computers and MP3 music players. Booming demand for such devices has created shortages throughout the industry, with expectations that the low supplies will result in product delays, revised configurations and eventually higher prices.


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Fujitsu and AMD said the new plant, constructed through their joint venture Fujitsu AMD Semiconductor Ltd. (FASL), will be the third manufacturing plant at their existing production facility. Construction is scheduled to start in August and is expected to be completed by February 2001, the companies said.

The total investment from the two companies is around 140 billion yen ($1.3 billion).

AMD, known mainly for PC processors, has recently found flash memory to be one of its fastest growing businesses. The company yesterday sold its communications products division, partly to focus on flash memory, an AMD representative said.

The increased demand for consumer devices has reinvigorated the flash memory business, which had been a barely profitable venture. Soaring demand for the memory--along with increasing revenues--has translated almost directly into profit because manufacturing costs are relatively fixed, analysts say.

In 1999, 1.3 billion megabytes of flash memory left factories, roughly twice the 690 million megabytes produced in 1998, according to market research firm Dataquest. The FASL plant's production capacity is expected to be around 13 million 16MB chips per month, growing to 52 million 16MB chips per month in 2002.

Fujitsu cited statistics projecting that flash memory market is growing at 20 percent per year. Other research pegs sales climbing from $4.5 billion in 1999 to $10 billion this year, with manufacturers Fujitsu, AMD and Intel expected to take the majority of the market.

News.com's Michael Kanellos contributed to this report.

 

 
AMD chips the secret ingredient in new supercomputer
By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
May 25, 2000, 1:35 p.m. PT
In a peculiar twist of fate, a technology AMD developed for spicing up computer games turns out to be useful for building supercomputers.

AMD's 3DNow technology was designed to improve the 3D graphics of games. But the feature can also be used to speed up mathematical calculations, said Hank Dietz, a professor at the University of Kentucky and the architect of a new 64-processor Linux supercomputer built out of 700-MHz AMD Athlon microprocessors.

The use of AMD chips is unusual for such systems. Athlons, and AMD processors in general, are almost exclusively found in single-processor consumer computers. The company will actually make one of its first forays into the business market later this year. The university's effort could conceivably help the company smooth that effort by effectively serving as a lab rat.

"Because of the 3DNow support, we've been able to get an awful lot more performance out of them than we're able to get with the current Intel line," Dietz said. AMD donated the chips to the university.

The machine, called the Kentucky Linux Athlon Testbed 2 (KLAT2), is a "Beowulf" computer, a collection of smaller computers networked together to throw their collective might at a single computational task. Each of the nodes of such machines typically runs the Linux operating system, a clone of Unix that's popular in academia because it can be tweaked as much as a researcher wants.

KLAT2 isn't very powerful compared with some Beowulf systems. But it's only a step on a path to greater glory for AMD and the University of Kentucky's computing program. Within the next year, Dietz expects his university will have made a supercomputer with at least 1,000 processors and perhaps as many as 4,000.