Digitimes throws us the daily tease

Cleve Nettles
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April 09, 2009
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What would a day be like without a vague Digitimes post stating that new Apple iPhone parts are moving around Asia?  Today it is flash chips.  Apple just bought 100 million 8Gb (not GB) NAND flash chips which is causing some shortages in the market.   Didn't Apple and Samsung have some sort of deal on flash?

Apple has reportedly placed orders for 100 million 8Gb NAND flash chips mostly with Samsung Electronics, which is likely to cause a supply shortage, according to sources at downstream suppliers. Nokia and Sony recently also began building their NAND flash inventories, further tightening supply, the sources added.

As Toshiba, Hynix Semiconductor, Intel and Micron Technology have allocated less chip supplies to the Asia market since early April, downstream memory suppliers are striving to grab more NAND flash chips to meet substantial volumes of short lead-time orders from device makers, the sources indicated.

Supply is expected to remain tight until at least the end of May, the sources said.

Comments (7)

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | April 09, 2009 - 6:23am

what is the difference between Gb and GB?

untitled (not verified) | April 09, 2009 - 9:31am

In computers, a zero or a one is considered a bit. Eight bits make one bite. A thousand bites makes a kilobyte, a thousand kilobytes makes a megabyte, and so on. Essentially, 8Gb is 1GB. Why is Apple buying one gigabyte chips? I don't know...

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | April 09, 2009 - 6:24am

what is the difference between GB and Gb

Seth Weintraub | April 09, 2009 - 6:24am

bits vs. bytes

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | April 09, 2009 - 6:44am

First Soilverlight, now Dititimes... unless of course that's the cute way of saying Digitimes and I'm missing the joke :)

PeterZ (not verified) | April 09, 2009 - 6:58am

Apple has all but confirmed this new iPhone launch. Someone estimated that 100 million 8Gb chips could translate into roughly 3.x million 32GB iPhones?

Thats sounds about right to me for the first quarter in the U.S. No way, heading into total depression, does the third Gen iPhone out-pace the previous two in sales.

Anyone worried about a shortage this time around really shouldn't be. If they produce similar inventories to the first two launches, demand should likewise be low enough to accommodate.

Pat (not verified) | April 09, 2009 - 7:53am

Don't think these chips are headed for a 32GB Iphone. The packaging wouldn't work. To get to 32GB you need the higher density chips which are then packaged with a mem controller.

http://www.toshiba.com/taec/news/press_releases/2008/memy_08_536.jsp