Free Republic

Samsung could report its worst profit in 14 years this week, as prices for memory chips, its biggest business, continue to fall, while demand stays weak. The South Korean technology giant guided earlier this month that it would post operating profit of 600 billion Korean won ($449 million) for the first quarter. If Samsung reports this number, it would be the company’s lowest profit since the first quarter of 2009. Samsung releases preliminary earnings guidance, but does not give detailed figures. It reports its full first quarter earnings on Thursday. Samsung is the world’s largest maker of memory chips, which...

A computer memory chip based on carbon nanotubes has passed a manufacturing milestone, according to the US company developing the technology.The prototype chip would store information using hundreds of billions of nanotubes with a theoretical capacity of 10 gigabits of data, says Nantero, based in Boston, Massachusetts.Once fully developed, the company says nanoscale random access memory (NRAM) could hold more data that existing types of RAM and would also be non-volatile, meaning data would not be lost when the power is been turned off. Computers using such memory could boot up almost instantly. Nantero also claims that NRAM would...