There are renewed suggestions coming into El Reg that flash suppliers Micron and Numonyx could join up later this month. The possibility surfaced in September, as it became clear how weak Numonyx was in terms of NAND flash sales. In December Micron recorded its first profitable quarter after several loss-making ones, while …

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Monday 4th January 2010 12:04 GMT robin penny

Micronyx already exists

Micronyx used to produce plug in security boards for PC's. The idea was to have a 2 state computer where the board couldn't possibly be tampered with by software installed on the computer and users required physical tokens to log in.. Marryl Lynch were so impressed they bought the company. I wonder what happened to them (not Merryl Lynch - Micronyx)? Perhaps the TPM chip took over some of their territory. They also had a software based version called Triumph! which could be easily bypassed by using Norton Utilities to "repair" the boot sector.

Actually I see there is a software company running under the name of Micronyx nowadays.

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Monday 4th January 2010 14:29 GMT Anonymous Coward

What PCM?

Why would Micron want to buy the money-losing NOR-maker Numonyx that Intel offloaded to a "JV" because it was hurting Intel's gross margins? Are you saying Micron is stupid?

The fact is that NOR is a money-losing, shrinking business, while phase-change memory (PCM) is simply a dead end. The only commercial PCM chip (P8P, formerly Alverstone) is not selling and there are no products that use it - which is not surprising given that PCM is a horrible technology (super expensive and slow in write, among others). Micron figured out that in 2004 (when they officially declared that PCM cannot scale). Micron knows - they licensed the PCM technology in 1994, 6 years before Intel and STM.

So, instead of repeating the myths that Numonyx and Intel (hell, even Samsung) are telling you, you should be asking them where are the products that use PCM!

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