News

Samsung Lands iPod Chip Deal

Thursday, April 27th, 2006 at 7:35 AM - by

Shortly after news that PortalPlayer won't be providing chips for some Flash-based iPod models surfaced, Samsung is claiming that it won the deal from Apple. According to EETimes, analysts speculated that Apple awarded the chip contract to Samsung, and Jon Kang, the company's senior vice president, has since confirmed their suspicions.

Mr. Kang sprung the news while speaking at the SEMI Strategic Business Conference on Wednesday. "I knew PortalPlayer would take a dive," he said. "I knew that we would win this design."

Last week, PortalPlayer announced that Apple will not be using its processor chips in upcoming iPod nano models. iPods that are shipping now use the company's system-on-a-chip processors to manage music transfers from computers and process media files.

Samsung's new "PortalPlayer killer," as Mr. Kang put it, is based on 32-bit processor technology from ARM Holdings.

The chip deal is a big win for Samsung. The company also provides a substantial percentage of the NAND Flash memory chips used in the iPod nano.

There is no word yet on when to expect iPods based on Samsung's processor to hit the market.

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