Samsung developing "PRAM" alternative to NAND flash memory

Classic Mac users might be familiar with the phrase: "did you zap the PRAM?" The commonly used fix-all seemed to smooth over a wide variety of troubles, but Samsung's new Phase-Change Random Access Memory has nothing to do with the Parameter RAM of yore. Instead, the new type of memory breathes fresh life into the world of non-volatile storage, with 30x the speed and 10x the lifetime of conventional NAND or NOR flash chips. Samsung just unveiled their first 512MB PRAM prototype PRAM chip, and plan to begin selling the memory in 2008. The chips cite spiffy tech specs like "vertical diodes" and "three-dimensional transistor structure" to keep size down, and the memory doesn't require old data to be erased before being written over. Supposedly the tech should be cheaper and smaller than NAND in the long-run -- which is considerable given the fact that Samsung also introduced a 32GB NAND chip today made with a 40nm process.

[Via textually.org]

[Peter S @ Sep 11th 2006 12:07PM]

Wow, does that remind you of the 8086 or what?

[Dave @ Sep 11th 2006 12:40PM]

I have to zap the PRAM-a-looooooooooot!!!!!!

[Ethan @ Sep 11th 2006 12:58PM]

The announced chips are 32 gigabits (Gb), not 32 gigabytes (GB). That's 4GB.

[Malcolm T @ Sep 11th 2006 1:18PM]

I agree 8086 does come to mind.

[Tyler @ Sep 11th 2006 1:55PM]

Marty, Marty, We need to go back to the future!

Doc brown is involved I know it!!!
http://img134.imageshack.us/img134/3738/historymp1.jpg

[hobgoblin @ Sep 12th 2006 2:11AM]

your right ethan, and that PRAM chip is 512Mbit, so its about 64Mbyte. or maybe we should say 64Mibyte?

[fc @ Sep 18th 2006 11:01AM]

It's hard to beat NAND cell size, since the adjacent transistors overlap. But PRAM should be competitive with NOR flash, where each transistor is individually accessed.

[zainka @ Aug 17th 2007 2:40AM]

How is...
1: Breakdown/Degradiation temperature, i.e. at which temperatures is the PRAM data reset or considered unreliable?
2: Error bits? NAND requires you to have some sort of error correction to be reliable where NOR does not, how aboute PRAM?
3: XIP-possebillities... Is tha data accessed by block addressing or byte addressing? Could one execute programs stored in PRAM or must it be loaded to f.x. SDRAM etc (XIP = eXecute In Place)