News items and other various tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share with his friends.
With the popularity of flash memory, it’s easy to forget that flash cells have a limited number of writes before they start failing—typically between 100,000 and 1 million. While this is probably more than enough for the casual user, it’s a good idea to remember that old flash memory may not be reliable.
Link: http://www.komando.com/…
Samsung has developed a potential replacement for flash memory, Phase-change Random Access Memory (PRAM). It’s 30 times faster than flash, lasts 10 times longer, and is less expensive to manufacture. Expect to see it in 2008.
A company named Freescale has gone into mass production with magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM). Its speed is much faster than Flash, but about an order of magnitude slower than current DRAM. If they can get the capacity increased (currently about 512KB), look for this to replace Flash memory. And if they can get the capacity and speed issues resolved, look for it to replace DRAM.
Memory prices are expected to go up in the next few months, so buy now or pay later.
Chad Cloman
Denver, CO USA
