Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, is to team up with Micron to make flash memory chips for Apple iPods.
Two companies will each contribute $1.2bn in a joint venture to produce the memory cards used by MP3 music players and digital cameras.
The move will challenge Samsung and Toshiba, who currently dominate the market for flash memory chips.
And Apple has signed deals worth $1.25bn to secure future supplies of the memory chips with all four firms.
I wonder if Apple and Intel discussed this possibility before the MacIntel decision?
From the Reuter’s story:
http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/051121/intel_micron.html
“The announcement comes as Apple on Monday said it would prepay $1.25 billion in the next three months as part of a deal to stock flash memory components used in its iPod digital music and video players.”
And this is after sewing-up a large part of Samsung’s production.
gotta luv “hardball” capitalism.
Can you say “barrier to entry” for Apple’s would-be competitors? I knew you could. 🙂
There’s speculation that Apple’s move is part of a plan to create an “instant on” computer.
http://compactURL.com/yrix
probably in preparation for a Mac-tel config that features a flash-based hard disk- aside from letting the ipod-heads sleep better at night.
Like any typical vendor-customer relationship – the customer outlined their needs for the long term to give the supplier opportunity to gear up.
Don’t know MAC OS, but any OS with a swap file can bring Flash RAM to end of life in a few hours; there is a limit to the number of write cycles with Flash and the frequent read/write cycles of swap files eat into this limit quickly.