merging technologies: Non-Volatile Memory
The memory technologies that dominate the computing industry today are, DRAM and NAND flash; but it should be noted that both of these technologies have their pros and cons. DRAM delivers the highest performance (latency / speed), with practically infinite endurance, yet it is volatile and has much lower capacity points than other memories (i.e NAND flash). NAND flash, on the other hand, scales to high capacity and is non-volatile, relatively cheap ($/Gbit) but is significantly slower than DRAM. Additionally NAND flash endurance and data retention are getting worse as process geometries continue to shrink, meaning that for write intensive enterprise applications, NAND flash, in the long term, may well not be an optimal memory technology.