<p>The 'future wars' are heating up: (While I think lt cap's got it right that INTC is facing perhaps the biggest challenges in a long time - some very nasty headwinds - their R and D budget is huge, and to some degree helps balance out the problems - not enought to erase them, but still....)  INTC and Micron announced a month or so ago their new 'solution' to a new type of memory that will crush today's flash.  Today, there's a story about the partnership between HP and Sandisk, claiming that they've produced their version of future memory chips to replace flash, and the stats say it is 1,000 times faster than current flash memory, and cheaper than DRAM.  Between those two and the little known startup company in Massachussets NRAM working on a third solution to the same problem, it may be very critical who wins out in this contest, as the winner  may well dominate the future. I'm not sure of one critical point: Whether this is an and/or issue - that is, two memory versions could be viable simultaneously, or whether the 'standards' for each kind of memory will require that the rest of the system be compliant with their usage standards. That is, is it going to be a choice between VHS tapes and Betamax (VHS obviously won), or, similarly, a 'middle ground' such as INTC or AMD cpu chips need exclussively compliant motherboards and chipsets, but can use the same DRAM, or is it exclusive, in that one new memory type requires the whole system to be different and compliant. I'd doubt the last scenario, but if it were true, the licensing fees income would be tremendous, I'd think. Not being an IT tech pro, I can't say. But I'd guess that it might be something like the GPU situation - you can have an AMD or Nvidia GPU card, but the standard PCI bus works with both, and the GDDR5 memory is generic to both also. Interesting to see what comes out of this.</p> <p>(In terms of a case of exclusive licensable fees: Years ago, when RAMBUS surprisingly won its patent suit against all the makers of DRAM, all of them had to pay tribute in the form of licensing fees, which Rambus lived off for years IIRC (maybe still), as they really didn't need to produce any actual product after that.)</p>