Sometimes, stocks go down for pretty stupid reasons, and we may have one of those situations today with SanDisk
The stock dropped as much a 6% earlier today, apparently owed to the news that Freescale Semiconductor
MRAM is like flash memory, in that it hangs onto data when the power's off. But it's also like the RAM in your computer, in that it's blazing fast (even faster than DRAM) and lasts a long, long time.
But it's unlike both of those in its lackluster capacities -- which investors need to keep in mind.
Freescale's current MRAM product has a capacity of 4 megabits. Unless my math is wrong -- and in the geeky world of bits, bytes, and such, it's possible -- Freescale's RAM killer sports a whopping 0.48 megabytes, at a cost of $25 per chip. For comparison, according to recent spot-market prices sent to me by a flash-market watcher, $31 gets you a flash memory chip of 1,907 megabytes.
That means you won't be seeing Apple
Freescale, of course, would like us to believe that the tech folktale of periodic doubling will soon bring MRAM capacities into line with established storage media. Unfortunately for them, flash producers, not to mention hard drive makers like Seagate
Certainly, Freescale investors might see some benefits should the product find its way into the niches where it's useful -- cars, small tech devices that need ultra-fast, stable memory -- but a sea change in the storage industry, this is not. Invest accordingly.
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Seth Jayson thinks there might be plenty of good reasons to sell SanDisk, but this isn't one of them. At the time of publication, he had shares of SanDisk, but no positions in any other company mentioned. View his stock holdings and Fool profile here. Intel is a Motley Fool Inside Value recommendation. Fool rules are here.