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IBM Research-Zurich has announced a new type of inexpensive and reliable universal nonvolatile memory, called phase change memory (PCM). Shattering Records, it supposedly reads and writes 100 times faster than conventional flashed-based memory with a latency of 10 microseconds, and is also several of orders of magnitude more reliable, with 10 million estimated write-cycles.
Surprisingly, the technology behind phase change memory is not expensive, and can be commercially used for a variety of devices requiring storage and memory, from servers of tablets. It's not going to be hitting markets very soon, with IBM stating the technology would enable "a paradigm shift for enterprise IT and storage systems, including cloud computing by 2016".
IBM's phase-change memory is built using cells created from a special alloy, which can be electrically controlled into different physical state-crystalline with low resistance properties, amorphous with high existence properties. Each alloy cells is capable of storing four data bits using different resistance levels, making it the multi-bit phase-change memory with reliable retention-only single bit PCM was capable of this earlier.