IBM DEVELOPS INSTANTANEOUS MEMORY ,100x FASTER THAN FLASH

You've got to hand it to IBM's
engineers. They drag
themselves into work after
their company's 100th

birthday

party
, pop a few Alka-Seltzers
and then promptly announce
yet another seismic invention.
This time it's

a new kind
of
phase change memory (PCM)
that reads and writes 100
times faster than flash, stays
reliable for millions of write-
cycles (as opposed to just
thousands with flash), and is
cheap enough to be used in
anything from enterprise-level
servers all

the way down
to
mobile phones. PCM is based on
a special alloy that can be
nudged into different physical
states, or phases, by controlled
bursts of electricity. In the
past, the technology suffered
from the tendency of one of
the states to

relax
and
increase its electrical resistance
over time, leading to read
errors. Another limitation was
that each alloy cell could only
store a single bit of data. But
IBM employees burn through
problems like these on their
cigarette breaks: not only is
their latest variant more
reliable, it can also store four
data bits per cell, which means
we can expect a
data storage

"paradigm shift" within the next
five years. Combine this with
Intel's promised 50Gbps
interconnect, which has a
similar ETA, and

data will
start
flowing faster than booze from
an

open bar
on the boss's tab.
There's more detailed science in
the PR after the break, if you
have a clear head.