[H]ardNews 5th Edition

Fab18 Factory Tour:

HardwareSecrets takes you on a tour of Intel's Fab18 Factory in Kiryat Gat, Israel. A factory that makes 90 nm Pentium 4 chips, chipsets and flash memory.

Due to its huge size – Fab18 has the size of two soccer courts – and to the very high cost of building and maintaining a clean room, instead of the entire factory being a huge clean room, only the parts needed to be operated under a clean environment use clean rooms. So the factory has several clean rooms. The area behind the clean rooms are called “chase”, and is where the process tools, electricity, exhaust, etc are located.

Exploitation 360:

ArsTechnica looks at the dark side of bundling. When supply is short and demand long why sell just the product when you can bundle it with other items you want to sell? Of course there is an ethical line that shouldn't be crossed.

When customers arrived at the store, however, they were given fliers that said that the advertised prices were incorrect, and that the store was instead offering more expensive bundles. Now it would cost a couple of hundred dollars more to get the Xbox 360, although you were getting more, too. In ethical terms, this is what's known as a bait and switch.

SDRAM Season:

DigiTimes has a short piece on how pressure to make memory manufacturers bottom line look good in the last quarter just might translate into lower prices for SDRAM. Which would be a nice Christmas present for geeks everywhere.

Sources at Hong Kong based memory trading houses indicated that both Hynix and Micron have start releasing a considerable amount of DRAM into the spot market, which has led to a drop in spot prices. The reduced prices have already edged to the same level as production costs, signifying the severe margin pressure that memory makers are facing, industry observers commented.