Sam's Club

Sam's West, Inc. (doing business as Sam's Club) is an American chain of membership-only retail warehouse clubs owned and operated by Walmart, founded in 1983 and named after Walmart founder Sam Walton. As of 2012, Sam's Club chain serves 47 million U.S. and Puerto Rican members and is the 8th largest U.S. retailer.As of January 31, 2008, Sam's Club ranks second in sales volume among warehouse clubs with 57 billion in sales behind Costco, despite the fact that Sam's has more retail locations.

Sam's Club had sales of $57.157 billion in FY 2014. It reported a 0.3% sales increase in 2014, 4.1% in 2013, and 8.4% sales increase in 2012. This is significantly higher growth than Walmart U.S. stores, which did not have higher than 2% growth since 2010.

Its major competitors are Costco and BJ's Wholesale Club.

As of December 31, 2015, Sam's Club operates 655 membership warehouse clubs in 48 U.S. states and Puerto Rico.Oregon and Vermont are the only states where Sam's Club does not operate. It also operates 160 locations in Mexico, 27 locations in Brazil and 12 in China. Locations generally range in size from 70,000–190,000 sq ft (6,500–17,700 m²), with an average club size of approximately 134,000 sq ft (12,400 m²).

Atmel ARM-based processors

Atmel ARM-based processors are microcontrollers and microprocessors integrated circuits, by Atmel, that are based on various 32-bit ARM processor cores, with Atmel-designed peripherals and tool support. Atmel ARM families complement their 8-bit AVR and 32-bit AVR32 lines of microcontrollers.

The "SAM" moniker in Atmel part numbers stands for "SMART Atmel microcontroller". The SMART line is a key component of Atmel’s Internet of Things (IoT) strategy. The SMART brand includes application-specific ARM-based parts for Wi-Fi, such as the SmartConnect and Smart Direct lines, as well as ARM-based ICs meant for smart energy products such as gas and power meters.

Overview

ARM licenses the core design for a series of 32-bit processors. ARM does not manufacture any complete silicon products, just intellectual property (IP). The ARM processors are RISC (reduced instruction set computers). This is similar to Atmel’s AVR 8-bit products, a later adoption of RISC architecture. Whereas the AVR architecture used Harvard architecture exclusively, some ARM cores are Harvard (Cortex-M3) and others are Von Neumann architecture (ARM7TDMI).