4 Amazing New Memory Technologies Coming this Decade

[DemonDragonJ]

I happened to find this (http://www.tech-faq.com/4-amazing-new-memory-technologies-coming-this-decade.html) news article, which speaks of new developments in computer memory. I myself am very excited about that subject, as those technologies promise faster and more efficient computing. In particular, I like the idea of memristors, as merging storage and memory into a single unit does seem to be a very logical idea.

What does everyone else say about this? Are you excited about these new forms of memory, even if some of them, apart from DDR4, are still potentially years away from mainstream adoption? I await your responses.

[Konrad]

Memristors have been proposed for decades. Racetrack is basically wonderful nano-magic. HMC is an advanced architecture which is completely different from traditional PC platforms.

These are all promising ideas, but I suspect good ol' "DDR4" - just the next increments in ever-smaller scaled circuit lithography and ever-faster embedded (memory bus) microcontrollers, possibly combined with a data bandwidth multiplication - will be in use long before any of these other technologies becomes realistic, let alone before any of them are ever adapted towards PC compatibility. A lot of industries are involved in PC tech and always like newer and faster but they are very resistant to drastic paradigm shifts.

Having said that, you never know what Intel and AMD will stamp into the dies on their next processor chips. They might very well integrate all sorts of magical nanoscale things which increase performance and decrease power consumption. I'd also be surprised if either one attempted to choke another costly RDRAM sort of debacle into the standards. Exploration of other possible memory technologies are usually left to companies like IBM and HP, and their enterprise focus isn't particularly concerned with lowly consumer PCs anyways.

I'm not trying to shoot down the article, it's better than most. But I am skeptical because nanoscale material engineering is just the latest-and-greatest hype, this sort of article reminds me of those Popular Science magazines from the 1960s which claimed we'd all be living like the Jetsons before the year 2000.