Innovation Alive And Well In Memory Chip Market

Surprises

from the still-waiting-on-fuel-cells-for-laptops dept

For several years MRAM has been described as a holy grail of memory technology, as it would seem to solve the memory trilemma, which is “Non-volatility, high speeds, low cost: pick two”. But like all holy grails, progress has seemed to go slow in bringing it to market, despite the fact that several companies have done research in it. Today, Freescale announced that it would finally bring the first chips to market, and that’s it’s already been in production with them for two months. At this point, it’s likely that there will be some hiccups, and it’s unlikely to prompt a revolution over night in the memory markets. But it’s exciting to see a breakthrough in hard technology, particularly at a time when most of what gets hype are non-tech uses of the web. And though memory chips are basically traded as a commodity, it doesn’t mean this is a permanent state of things, as some would suggest.