In the sense that it's solid-state, perhaps. But it's more like this will change computing history. Current so-called "SSDs" are likely doomed to total obsolescence within the next few years if this stuff can be made affordable.
Nonsense. This does not make the actual CPU faster or your graphics card faster, except that it can communicate faster. The point is the CPU limits what can be done in the end. You can't create something akin to THE MATRIX just because you have faster memory. You need more CPU and GPU power just for starters. As I've said, this could potentially kill current conventional storage and memory. Storage has always been a bottleneck, though.
I'm curious exactly how more robust this memory is. Are we talking about something that could be trusted for 100+ year storage like manufactured (pitted) music CDs can supposedly survive? One of the limitations of SSDs (and conventional hard drives for that matter) is the mean time to failure. It's why backups are so important (along with malware and fires and other things). You'd never be able to entirely eliminate backups for the latter reasons, but they would be less crucial if failure happened less often.
Now think about what this technology will do to networking. I'd stop investing in so-called "Cloud Storage" right NOW. This is going to literally KILL THE CLOUD for significant data storage. Small stuff (bookmarks, saved game progress, etc.) will continue, but few are going to want to backup terabytes of data over a SLOW NETWORK CONNECTION (and make no mistake, even Google Fiber is SLOOOOW compared to what we're talking about here, like conventional hard drive slow, maybe 120MB/sec. That's fast for networking and acceptable for backing up large drives once in awhile (assuming you could actually upload that fast, usually it's just the download rates that are that fast). But SSDs are around 10x faster. Now imagine storage that is 1000x faster. But WAIT, the article seems to be comparing that speed to RAM, not storage! RAM is nearly 20x faster than the fastest SSDs. Thus, if this stuff is 1000x faster than ram, then it might be 20,000 times faster than SSDs!!! No network "CLOUD" connection on Earth can compare to that. I submit that THE CLOUD IS DEAD for big data storage and it doesn't know it yet. Sell stock NOW.
Agreed, this IS HUGE.
A HUGE breakthrough in computing storage and memory technology. One of the biggest technological breakthrough in decades.
This potential means future systems will not have a storage device, and a memory device . I will simply have 1 storage/memory chip. when you look at your computer / tablet /smartphone specs. You will not look for storage size, and RAM size, you will simply just look for the Xpoint size and speed. Of course software will have to be redesigned to take advantage of this, operating systems, and applications will work very differently.
Worrying about how much RAM an application is using, may become an issue of the past. When writing applications developers may not need to care how much memory it is using or leaking etc. Because there simply won't be any memory.
It is insane, NAND is not slow, it is the fastest non-volatile storage technology, other than this obviously.
