Samsung could report strong 4th quarter results
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Jan. 4, 2012
According to some high tech industry analysts, Samsung could soon be announcing some strong 4th quarter results.
The company has had strong smartphone sales in the past two months, and the trend seems to be continuing.
Samsung, which is constantly trying to beat Apple for the title of top smartphone maker, has seen its star rise
somewhat meteorically in the segment, with its mobile phone division accounting for over half its profits in the last
quarterly report.
In the fourth fiscal quarter, Samsung introduced the Galaxy Nexus, Google's flagship phone featuring the new Android
operating system-- Ice Cream Sandwich. The hotly anticipated release, along with its still-popular Galaxy SII, should see
smartphone profits continue to grow.
The South Korean electronics giant is likely to report an operating profit of US $4.1 billion for October to December,
according to a consensus of thirty industry analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. Its third quarter results for the period
to September saw it post an operating profit of US $3.7 billion.
Samsung's main claim to fame used to be its memory chip business, a segment that has been down quite a bit from poor
consumer demand for personal computers. However, Samsung is busily countering the drop there by focusing its resources
on making the types of chips used in mobile phones, tablets and cameras-- that's where most of the money is these days.
Last month, the company applied to build a new chip factory in China to produce NAND chips, an application that the
South Korean Ministry of Knowledge Economy has now approved, according to Chinese news agency Xinhua.
Samsung is slated to begin construction of the new factory in the first half of 2012, and hopes to start production
at the factory in the second half of the year.
In other hi tek news
There's more and more evidence today that storage area networks (SANs) are slowing down access to vital corporate data,
and PCIe flash DASs beat SAN and NAS systems nine times out of ten, and are rapidly increasing in popularity in the IT
community.
To be sure, some in the industry still call PCIe flash with the moniker 'storage memory' but it's still very fast
direct-access storage. It provides applications in servers much faster access to stored data than if it was stored on
SANs and NASs.
A typical hard drive can do 250 or so IOPS. Flash can do hundreds of thousands of IOPS. However, this obscures networked
storage's advantages where many servers need to share data (NAS) or a large storage resource (SAN).
The networked storage issue, when compared to flash DAS, is two fold. First, the hard driveshave seek time latency as
well as low IOPS rates, and the network adds its own latency to make matters worse. And solid state drives (SSDs) in a networked
array have the same network latency issues, although they have the IOPS rate advantage over disk.
But network latency isn't really the real evil in networked storage access. Really, the two major issues here are disk
seek times and low IOPS numbers.
In sequential I/O, disks are fast, but in today's world IOPS seem to be rated more highly than MB/sec. Overall, virtualized
multi-core and multi-threaded servers are inherently very impatient. They need data for the apps in their virtual machines
instantly.
Now that CPU cycles cost a lot less than before, they are treated as the most precious resource in the data center.
It's all about time and cloud computing and centralization of application software.
Downstream, the focus is moving to networked storage arrays, now becoming flash-enhanced storage arrays and even all-flash
storage arrays, getting better at serving PCIe flash. And network latency may well become the villain of the whole puzzle,
prompting general moves to 16 Gbit/s Fibre Channel and 40 Gbit/s Ethernet.
That's currently the thinking of the industry on storage, and PCIe flash is the storage industry's great new hope. It
will be interesting to see how fast and to what extent the IT industry will fix these critical issues.
Source: Samsung Electronics.
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