The recent announcement by Intel regarding advancements to phase change memory herald a profound shift in how storage and memory systems on computers will work in the near future. The use of material phase states to store data means phase change memory that will blur the necessary distinctions between long and short term memory requirements on current systems. Instead of having fast volatile RAM in systems and secondary storage for data persistence, only a single memory store will be required. The need to load data "into memory" in order to participate in computations will be rendered obsolete. Instead, all persistent data will be accessible just as easily in memory. In essence, we will have large capacity in-memory data stores. This type of memory will unify volatile/non-volatile memory rendering the distinction irrelevant. One of the obvious advantages will be the "instant on" capability of devices which use this type of memory. Computing devices will begin to behave more like appliances without the ubiquitous boot times associated with most computers today.

The long range implications of this advancement is the application of phase change materials to processors themselves. Instead of a lithographed realization of a processor on a silicon die, processors themselves will be reconfigurable to take advantage of new designs. The general purpose CPU will be replaced by processors which can behave as Field Programmable Gate Arrays. The ability to reconfigure the processor depending on the computational task will allow for more efficient execution of instructions within an execution context. Dynamic hardware parallelism will allow for computationally expensive operations to be optimized at the processor level.

Keep an eye out for advancements in material sciences which will allow this type processor morphism.

No spin: Ars reviews the MacBook Air with solid state drive

A lot of reviews of the MacBook Air are starting to trickle in and I think one of the most obvious gripes with this machine is the lackadaisical disk performance. Due to the space constraints associated with the Air form factor, it seems obvious to leverage chip set functionality to improve I/O performance. The Santa Rosa chipset already supports "Robson"; external flash based caches for hard drive operations. If this technology were leveraged to cache writes to the disk, you could have the best of both worlds. Random access speed would be matched by sequential write performance.

Of course, this will probably be mitigated by second generation consumer level solid state drives. But until this inevitability materializes and the cost of SSDs descend from the stratosphere, this seems like a reasonable compromise.

There seems to be a ground swell regarding the next gen iPhone, but given the recent Intel announce regarding Atom, I suspect that something else is being developed in the Apple Skunk Works. The growing popularity of the EEE PC from Asus points to a trend of ultra-mobile computing that Apple would be foolish to ignore. This trend combined with the apparent success of the Kindle point to a hand-held device based on a 7-9 inch touch screen with wireless capabilities. I think that Apple acknowledges that there are display limitations inherent in the current iPhone/Touch form factors that can be addressed by a somewhat larger form factor. Think of it as the big brother / premium version of the Touch targeted at media distribution. As well as sporting the ubiquitous music/podcast functionality, it could potentially have the following capabilities:

• act as a light weight browser application platform with integrated off-line capability (via Air or Google Gears)
• function as a truly portable e-book reader with the same functionality as Kindle with books accessible via the iTunes store through the wireless connection
• act as remote viewer for television shows and movies
• allow for wireless syncing via 802.11n / 3G wireless

In addition to the obvious advantages, it would solve the current keyboard dilemma by offering more screen real estate to display the current software keyboard. Combine this with a fuller syntax of gesture based control and you have a winner. It would fill the product niche between the Air and the Touch.

Think I'm crazy? Remember that the iPhone was in development for years before the actual launch, but the signs where there in the market. Apple had only to develop for the obvious void.