Samsung memory stirs up hornet's nest

WHEN WE wrote about Samsung's TCCD memory chip production this week, we stirred up something of a hornet's nest.

We were lauded, ridiculed, praised and insulted for our exclusive news. We've had a chance to do more investigation now, and we're still finding massive inconsistencies in the data being presented to us.

First off, an article over at Legit Reviews claims to be the be all and end all of this matter. The Legit guys talked to a bunch of companies and got official comments from them all, and claim these comments prove the INQ wrong. They don't. The comments are merely the public faces of a bunch of RAM companies who are suddenly facing big changes in their stock. At least two of the companies that 'Legit' interviewed that told them that there was no problem, told the INQ a completely different story, off the record and on the phone. Moral of the story? As Jeremy Paxman once said, when talking to people on the record, always think: "Why are these lying bastards lying to me?"

One thing that is clear is that Corsair still has stock. The Fremont guys have just signed a six month agreement to get hold of the chips from Samsung, and we suspect that it will be the only company able to get any. The channel is already emptied of TCCDs, there are no places for anybody who isn't Corsair to buy them. This is good news for Corsair, which, we think, are going to have the monopoly on the parts.

Now, there are some alternatives for the memory companies. There are new Winbond modules being produced, and there are Micron modules that are almost as good. But they ain't TCCD.

We spoke to Samsung. It told us officially that it was continuing production of DDR to support AMD systems. However, it flat-out refused to say specifically, and officially, whether that production was scaling down, but our conversations with the firm suggests to us that it is. Samsung is aggressively ramping up productions of DDR2 memory using new Fully-Buffered parts, as well as PlayStation 3 XDR memory. Samsung is heavily pushing the latter, and is even making plans to set aside more capacity in the event that a PC desktop chipset starts to support it. The technologies are competing with each other for time in the fabs, and enthusiast-grade modules are such small sellers, they're the first to lose capacity.

So, there you have it. Only the coming days will confirm our story, but expect to see something of a switcheroo in most product lines. That is, of course, unless the memory chaps manage to kick up such a fuss at Samsung that it can convince the firm to make a u-turn. But with the inflection point for DDR2 approaching, where manufacturing capacity make price and performance a more attractive proposition than DDR1, we would be surprised to see that happening. µ