Solid State Macs In Five Years?

SOLID STATE MACINTOSHES?

I said something like this about a year ago in a blog called “No Media Drives On Intel Macs?”

A lot of you offered excellent analysis as to why this would not happen soon, if at all.

Unfortunately, right after that, the WebHost for MyMac.com lost all our comments on all our blogs, so your thoughts about the subject went into the Ether, never to be seen again (unless you would like to resurrect those comments here at the end of this blog.)

Ahem.

However, INTEL has pushed the envelop for us all, into the field of solid state computing, and it is an extraordinary thing.

eWEEK.com has this to say about that –

“Intel, as part of a lengthy joint venture with ST Microelectronics, has produced the first Phase Change Memory or PCM chips—nonvolatile memory chips that work well for both executing code and storing large amounts of data, giving it a superset of the capabilities of both flash memory ( NAND/NOR) and dynamic random access memory (DRAM). This means PCM can both execute code with performance, store larger amounts of memory and also sustain millions of read/write cycles.

‘This is pretty exciting stuff,’ said Ed Doller, chief technology officer for Intel’s Flash Memory Group, based in Folsom, Calif., during an interview with eWEEK.”

(Mr. Doller is no relation to Mr. Dollar of Dollar Rent-a-car.)

INTEL cited the fact that flash memory is getting close to the end of silicon fabrication processes, and that what was needed, and found by them, was a “Quantum Leap.”

(Quantum Leap – A sort of technological leap leading to the future of computing, and not at all associated with the televison show of the same name.)

“During the interview, Mr. Doller produced what he said was one of the very first PCM wafers, containing numerous 128-megabit PCM chips produced in a ST Microelectronics chip plant in Agrate, Italy, and sent to him just hours before.”

(The 10 inch wafer was sort of cranberry colored, and full of yellow flashes and purple gleams – definitely not the dull green of silicone that we are used to.)

The reason the chips look different is that they are made of chalcogenide, the same stuff used to make the active layer within rewritable optical disks. Except that lasers are not used to create zeros and ones in the layers, but an overlaying resistor is used instead, to heat up the material’s properties to make the volatile/solid state dense digital data matrix we are so fond of in all our computing experiences.

Mr. Doller said that INTEL would begin sampling PCM chips to customers over the next several months.***

PCM chips do seem to be the long term replacement for flash memory chips, which is why you are reading this blog at MyMac.com. Apple Computer has a vested interest in INTEL and its advances, and we all know, if only subconsciously, that all computers some day will be driveless solid state devices with no moving parts at all, right?

(Subconsiously – In the manner that some of us have of future memories – at least those of us who own/are owned by cats.)

It is just a matter of time, because with the new PCM volatile/solid state chips, it may not be long before we see Steve Jobs introduce one of these in Macintosh form, at the Keynote at MacWorld.

Remember, you read it here first.

Film at 11.

*** In fact I have one of these self-same PCM chips, wired into my portacath in my chest. It is excellent for waking-up-running, hitting-the-deck, raring-to-go, sort of experience in the morning. Although, the programmed chip does take into account my bum ticker, so the experience is sort of in slow motion, but still better than a double shot from the nearby FourBucks coffee shop, and I don’t have to get dressed to go get it.

Regards,
Ro-ge’r B’o r*n
“I am really looking forward to living in the moment.”

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