After 38 years, a new type of memory to hit market

[Zappypants]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9906755-7.html?tag=mncol;txt

From the article:

"Why will the world want PCM? Performance, says Numonyx CTO Ed Doller. PCM chips can survive tens of millions of read-write cycles, he said, or far more than flash. Reading data to PCM chips takes 70 to 100 nanoseconds, or as fast as NOR flash. Data can be written to the chips at a rate of 1 megabyte a second, or equivalent of NAND flash. There is also no erase cycle, making it similar to DRAM.
In other words, you have the best attributes of three different types of memory--plus, PCM will potentially use far less power."

Pretty neat tech.

 

[Soulzz]

Interesting read Zappy, thanks! That gives great hope for future SSD's and what have you .

 

[HeatSurge]

What the fuck!? This is crazy!

"The delays have largely stemmed from two sources. First, it's not an easy technology to master. In phase change memory chips, a microscopic bit on a substrate gets heated up to between 150 degrees and 600 degrees Celsius. The substrate is made of the same stuff as CD disks. The heat melts the bit, which when cooled solidifies into one of two crystalline structures, depending on how fast the cooling takes place. The two different crystalline structures exhibit different levels of resistance to electrical current, and those levels of resistance in turn are then as ones or zeros by a computer. Data is born."

So, it's gonna be heating up microscopic cells of material and cooling it all the time? Sounds pretty difficult and prone to failure, but we'll see.

Then again, DVD-RW is kind of a similar deal.

 

[UnLO]

Sounds like another failed tech, unless it could incorporate an erase cycle the only thing i could see this being used for much like DRAM is for storing unchanged data like the bios or an OS. Speaking of which SSD here I come!