Sounds amazing, from any side that I look at it! That's a lot of work, thank you so much! <3
> Everything. I want 3-10 samples of everything. > Apparently everything in China is… a lot of chips. Now I am re-reading and imagining this :)) What a collection! On Thu, Jul 9, 2026 at 7:11 PM Abdelkader Boudih <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi everyone, > > A few months ago I ordered a batch of SPI flash chips from AliExpress for my > own projects. After all, one does not simply order one flash chip. > > The seller accepts custom orders for parts that are not listed. He asked me > which chips I wanted. > > My answer was simply: > > Everything. I want 3-10 samples of everything. > > Apparently everything in China is… a lot of chips. > > One thing I did appreciate at the time is that the seller is a trader, not a > manufacturer. He spent several months sourcing the requested parts before > shipping them. Since I had bought from him before, he simply assumed this was > another one of my 'buy samples of everything' requests. By the time > everything had been collected, there was no way I was going to leave him > holding the bag. > > Fast forward a few months, and I now have roughly $3k worth of SPI flash > devices. Thanks to the recent flash memory price increase, they are probably > worth more today (around 10K in Mouser). Still a more honest ROI than NFTs. > Nobody got rug-pulled. > > The practical consequence is that, over the coming months, I expect to submit > a steady stream of verified chips to flashrom. > > For each device I will collect the datasheet, verify the identification, and > group variants by JEDEC ID, voltage variants, etc. > > The main thing I need to watch out for is avoiding duplicate testing, because > many of the same SKUs arrived in four or five different packages (DIP, SOIC, > TSOP …). > > Some of these parts are already EOL or out of stock worldwide. That does not > make them useless, though. Someone repairing or recovering an older device > may still run into them. > > I also do not regret paying for the lot. The cost of the chips is small > compared to the amount of human time it should save. Instead of multiple > people wondering whether flashrom really supports a device, reviewers > rechecking the same datasheets, or users waiting several release cycles for > someone to eventually verify a chip, that work can simply be done once and > upstreamed. > > This email is mostly a heads-up. If you start seeing chip verification > patches arriving like a broken cron job, nothing unusual is happening. I am > simply working through a very large pile of flash chips. > > Some people buy 48 GB of VRAM. I bought 48 GB of SPI flash. > > Veni, Vidi, Verified. > (Repeated 1000 times.) > > Abdelkader Boudih > _______________________________________________ > flashrom mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] -- Anastasia. _______________________________________________ flashrom mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
