[DasIch]

It appears to be slower than DRAM, so it's not going to be a sufficient replacement. I also see no indication of how much storage it actually offers. The range between RAM and SSDs isn't that large and I think it's going to be a huge difference whether they can offer 16GB, 32GB or even 64GB at an affordable price.

For a lot of users 16GB might not be worthwhile, 64GB might actually allow some people to not use a SSD at all, so it I think they will have to provide 32GB of storage. That seems obvious enough that the fact it's not stated in the article seems somewhat concerning.

[aidenn0]

The article specifically puts it at a price point lower than DRAM but higher than flash. It's a passive array which helps make it cheaper than DRAM, but stores only one bit per cell, while modern NAND stores up to 3 bits per cell.

[wtallis]

They're promising the first chip to be 128Gb, which is where MLC flash is right now. But their die size looks a lot larger than MLC.

[DasIch]

Interesting. At 128GB it's definitely practical to put your system partition and applications on it. If you rely heavily on cloud services that would be more than sufficient for most people and even if it isn't you could add an SSD for music and videos.

If they release it next year and it turns out well, I can certainly see Apple pulling such a move for the MacBook (Air).

[wtallis]

128Gb, not 128GB. You still need quite a few chips to build a usefully large drive.

[davrosthedalek]

128Gb is only a small factor below state-of-the-art flash chips, if at all. I think 3d NAND drives it up to 384 Gbit/die. Don't know about the die size though.

[Pharaoh2]

Quite a few being... 8.