Yahoo - Memory-chip maker Micron Technology Inc. has agreed to buy Elpida Memory Inc. for approximately $750 million in cash in a deal that would boost its wafer manufacturing capacity by about 50 percent.
Elpida specializes in dynamic random access memory chips used in mobile phones and computers. It has been developing a plan of reorganization since filing for the largest manufacturing bankruptcy ever in Japan earlier this year.
Maximum PC: Few would argue against the notion that today's high performance solid state drives are blazing fast, especially compared to mechanical hard disk drives, but imagine what tomorrow's SSDs will be like. Before you do that, take into consideration that Intel and Micron just unveiled a new non-volatile memory technology that they claim is 1,000 times faster than NAND flash memory. Yes, 1,000 times! We'll give you a moment to pick your jaw up off the floor and clean the coffee off your monitor.
Maximum PC: It's easy to get lazy towards the end of the work week as we look forward to the weekend, but not so at Micron. Rather than check out early, Micron today announced the introduction of a monolithic 8Gb DDR3 SDRAM component based on the company's latest-generation 25nm DRAM manufacturing process. According to Micron, the addition of an 8Gb monolithic component will enable cost-effective, high-capacity solutions optimized for large-scale, data-intensive workloads.
Maximum PC: Color us impressed with Micron's marketing of its new Crucial MX100 solid state drive line. Rather than try and oversell the drive with exaggerated rhetoric and fancy pants nomenclature, Micron is billing the Crucial MX100 SSD as a drive that offers cost-effective mainstream performance. Indeed, while the drive's sequential read and write speeds of up to 550MB/s and 500MB/s, respectively, are no longer unique, they're still some of the fastest available in the SATA space.
