memory

Apple has acquired Israel-based flash memory startup Anobit, a report claims.

The deal, according to Israel's Calcalist business news site (Google Translate), is in the $400 million to $500 million range. Earlier today, Anobit apparently informed its employees that Apple had made an offer that it had accepted and that they were on their way to being employed by the iPhone maker.

Today's report follows a claim made by Calcalist last week, saying that Apple and Anobit were nearing a deal.

Anobit's flash memory technology is found in Apple's iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air. The startup … Read more

Panasonic, Samsung, SanDisk, Sony, and Toshiba today announced an agreement to develop new content-protection technology for SD cards and embedded flash.

Dubbed "Next Generation Secure Memory Initiative," the press release claims the as-yet undeveloped technology will be based around public key encryption. Based on the release's limited information, it sounds like it will create unique IDs that will tie a variety of fixed and mobile CE devices to you, making content producers less nervous about allowing you to download--rather than just stream--DRM'd content to devices they currently can't control, like phones and tablets. … Read more

A bad memory module (RAM) can cause unpredictable behavior in a Windows system, including the dreaded blue screen of death. If you suspect that your RAM may be faulty, you can run a memory test to confirm that you have a bad memory module.

Laptop and desktop PC makers occasionally provide preinstalled utilities that sometimes include a memory test. Feel free to try out those utilities, especially if your computer is under warranty and you want to make a warranty claim. Manufacturers will often require you to run their support utilities first, before agreeing to replace hardware or move forward … Read more

According to a report over at TechCrunch (drawing on Calcalist, a Hebrew publication), Apple is preparing to purchase Israeli flash memory manufacturer Anobit for $400 million to $500 million.

The acquisition would be CEO Tim Cook's first as the guy in charge at Apple, though he has been through the process before. Apple recently purchased P.A. Semi in order to produce the mobile processors (the A4 and A5) that now appear in iPhones and iPads.

Purchasing Anobit seems like a prudent move on Apple's part. By controlling its own flash storage manufacturing, Apple should be able to … Read more

It's a thumb drive with the size and power of a supercomputer.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center in January will start the engines on Gordon, a supercomputer that uses flash memory extensively to handle massive amounts of data. Using flash as an integral building block means the supercomputer will crank through data-intensive problems, such as analyzing human genomes, 10 times faster than traditional designs.

The idea for using flash memory was shunned by commercial companies, San Diego Supercomputer Center officials told Wired. But they were able to convince the National Science Foundation about three years ago to invest the $… Read more

The CompactFlash Association has finished its work designing a successor to today's high-end memory card format, naming its successor XQD and promising much higher data-transfer speeds.

CompactFlash, unlike many other memory card formats, has managed to withstand the onslaught of SD Card, but it's relegated to a high-end niche such as professional SLR cameras and Canon's new C300 cinema-oriented videocamera. CompactFlash capacity and transfer speeds beat SD today, but to stay ahead of the competition, it's got to improve.

Enter XQD, a project the CompactFlash Association announced last year. The new cards use the PCI Express … Read more

Yesterday Apple released an update to Safari, which it claims, among other issues, fixes two prominent ones that resulted in high memory usage and periodic instances where loaded pages would flash white (seen when switching to a different window or at times when interacting with the page).

Unfortunately even though Safari no longer flashes loaded pages white, there may still be instances where you can encounter similar behaviors. With version 5.0, Apple split Safari's process into two components: a main Safari parent program, and a child process called Safari Web Content that is responsible for rendering the scripts … Read more

IBM and Micron Technology are beginning to produce a new memory chip based on technology designed to boost memory speeds 15-fold.

The technology, the companies announced today, will be used to make a Hybrid Memory Cube chip that will be commercially manufactured by Micron, the largest manufacturer of memory chips in the United States and one of the largest in the world. IBM plans to manufacture and supply the "controller" silicon that will be used in the memory as well as in the 3D-chip technology.

The joint efforts are designed to result in memory chips that realize the … Read more

Last week, German tech site macerkopf.de stated that sources close to the development of iOS 5.0.2 claimed the update was coming this week to address battery performance issues that have been plaguing several iPhone 4S users since its release. Today, the site claims that the update will be delayed because of memory leaks in the code.

The most scandalous reports about the iPhone 4S thus far have been the battery performance issues, a problem that even Apple admitted, which it is not one to do very often.

The current version of iOS (5.0.1) was supposed … Read more