Intel

Intel Corp. has revealed a prototype PRAM (phase change RAM) wafer, long under development, at IDF Spring 2007 in Beijing, China, which began on April 16, 2007. At the keynote speech, Intel's CTO Justin Rattner announced, "the company will start mass-production of PRAM as early as the second half of 2007." He also said, "We consider replacing NOR flash memory with PRAM first, but that's not our goal. PRAM may possibly replace DRAM in the near future. We are paying a lot of attention to the technology."

Intel's chief technology officer Justin Rattner is set to give the first public demonstration of the company's PRAM (phase-change RAM) technology at this week's Intel Developer Forum (IDF) conference.

Intel's new phase-change memory technology, called PRAM by Intel and PCM by others who are working on the same type of memory, is set to sample in the first half of this year. Intel says they plan to ship the first PRAM modules as a straight-ahead NOR flash replacement so that they can work the kinks out of the design before trying to move it up the memory hierarchy. The company claims a much higher number of read-write cycles (100 million) than flash, as well as a potential 10 years' worth of data retention.