Right after coming off its 100th birthday, IBM has come up with a new type of phase-change memory that can read and write a whopping hundred times faster than existing flash memory. With capabilities like that, you might expect it to be expensive, fragile or short, but miraculously enough, this new “instantaneous memory” is reliable for millions of write-cycles, beating flash memory by about three orders of magnitude, and it looks like it will be cheap enough to make its way into use in mobile phones. This amazing little guy was only born recently so, of course, it’ll be a while before any make their way into active circulation, but when they do, it will drastically reduce the amount of time we spend staring at mobile device loading animations. About time, too. Several seconds is several seconds too long.
(via Engadget)
Published: Jun 30, 2011 11:57 am