Actually, it's 40 chips for 640MB on a DIMM. The sample they demonstrated was 10GB in total.

I've spent all of two days now reading about PCM, but here's an observation: The lessons learned in making NAND flash work as a high-speed storage medium are applicable here as well. Many of the problems are the same, with the need for wear-leveling and optimization of write performance. The solutions appear to be somewhat different though. Their wear-leveling algorithm does not at all resemble the complexity of a typical FTL and I think that's the point.

Dealing with the problems of getting this technology to scale are simpler and cheaper to address than those presented by NAND flash, if only because in-place writes are now back on the table, with no erase-before-write cycle. This technology looks like it needs to ramp up in density though before it's a viable alternative to current NAND flash. 40 chips for 10GB on a DIMM is not going to get much done inside a 2.5" SSD case.

I also did not think their comparison to PCIe-based SSDs was fair. They called these 'state of the art', when the best SSDs are currently designed around use over a SATA3 bus and have performance figures much higher than those quoted.

You're a troll, but I'm going to respond anyway. Perl is the foundation of a mission-critical web-based auction platform that has transacted in excess of 5 trillion dollars. Some "toy."

You make goods points, food for thought... I only wish to clarify the point I was making when I said "...high cost console gaming..." and that is based on the way we (my wife and myself) buy PC games. Almost all games for the PC come out at around the price you can get them for on the console. However if you wait even a month, most of these titles will sell for half of what their console counterpart sells for. Consoles games often take years to come down to the same price I can buy a PC game for after only a month or two, if ever. I have an entirely unscientific suspiscion as to the reason for this PC platform, game price reduction and that is piracy. Clearly these titles are still selling on the PC after a month or two. The original Half Life is one of the few titles which after several years on store shelves was still selling for around forty dollars retail. It is MUCH harder to pirate console games than it is to pirate PC games.

I guess the cost effectiveness of console gaming comes down to this: Do you purchase MANY titles in the time you own your console or just a few? My PC hardware costs more for certain but as of late I find that I don't need to upgrade as often to play the latest games as most of the titles are simultaneously being released for slower console-based hardware. Yes, consoles are MUCH easier to use and less prone to the problems of PC games and that is definitely a mark in their favor. From the perspective of a PC gamer however, they stifle the market for new titles and new rendering methods after a couple of years. It is not in the best interest of the console manufacturer to release new hardware as long as the market for their competition has not dictated they need to compete.