Samsung breaks Intel Xeon NDAs in a press release

Forgettable PR other than the corporate intrigue

Samsung - logoIf you want to know embargo’d Intel Xeon news, don’t wait or sign away your life, just look out for Samsung press releases. Yeah we know this particular bit of news will shock absolutely no one, but Samsung did blatantly break an NDA and directly name the Intel product involved so it became news.

As a bit of a back story, SemiAccurate doesn’t bother writing up Samsung ‘news’ because they refuse to actually put anything other than self-congratulatory pabulum out. It is a waste of time being “briefed” by the company when for example they won’t tell you basics like process geometry even though they were publicly showing the wafers in question off weeks earlier, even handing us one at a show.

When the press releases come out we sometimes read them and usually giggle at the liberal bending of the facts contained therein. Some are worse than others while a few are flat-out fabrications, those we actually write-up. Yesterday’s release however was a new twist, they named another company’s products and directly violated an embargo in doing so.

What is the problem? Try this sentence on for size, “At Samsung, we are taking the lead in readying the DDR4 market to coincide with the introduction of the next-generation Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 product family, and plan to contribute to creating a bigger market for DRAM in the second half of 2014”. That was attributed to Jim Elliot, corporate vice president, Memory Marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.

Why is this a problem? Intel hasn’t announced a Xeon E5 v3 product family much less the 2600 line. Given the creativity of Intel marketing names of late this name will surprise no one but it is NDA’d info. So is the fact that the product that sane people call Haswell-EP uses DDR4, another NDA’d bit. Sure SemiAccurate pointed out the code name Grantley years ago, and we were playing with Grantley systems last fall, but Hynix, Inphi, Kingston, and tons of others refused to comment on anything related to the system at IDF. They still do. Or don’t. Or… well lets just say that none of them violated Intel NDAs.

So in the end if Samsung doesn’t occupy our time with technical bits worth writing the only time they will get coverage on SemiAccurate is when they pull a whoopsie. From the look of it they will be getting a lot of column inches in the near future, keep it up. The one request we will make is that when you guys break NDAs, please try to do it on topics we don’t know about already. Thanks.S|A

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Charlie Demerjian

Roving engine of chaos and snide remarks at SemiAccurate
Charlie Demerjian is the founder of Stone Arch Networking Services and SemiAccurate.com. SemiAccurate.com is a technology news site; addressing hardware design, software selection, customization, securing and maintenance, with over one million views per month. He is a technologist and analyst specializing in semiconductors, system and network architecture. As head writer of SemiAccurate.com, he regularly advises writers, analysts, and industry executives on technical matters and long lead industry trends. Charlie is also available through Guidepoint and Mosaic. FullyAccurate