When Gordon Moore made his prediction in a 1965 issue of Electronic Magazine (download PDF) that the number of transistors on a chip would double every year (eventually updated by Moore to two years and then updated again by Intel to 18 months), it was just a "lucky guess" based on a few points of data, he recalled in an interview in 2006. But the idea, which has grown to encompass ever cheaper, ever smaller, ever more powerful components, has so captivated the IT industry that you can't attend a technology conference without seeing at least one PowerPoint presentation displaying the Moore's Law graph.
When disaster looms, who you gonna call? It could increasingly be a mathematician if IBM scientists succeed in one of their current research efforts.
A new kind of flash memory technology with potentially greater capacity and durability, lower power requirements, and the same design as flash NAND is primed to challenge today's solid-state disk products.
Now that companies have mastered the virtualization of server operations, vendors are increasingly selling the idea of virtualizing the entire data center. The idea of enabling the dynamic management of servers, storage and network devices through a single "fabric" places new virtualization offerings firmly in the realm of becoming a data center platform. That platform may spawn a new IT position for a person who would supervise the management of the virtual layer of server, network and storage infrastructures.
With the opening this week of a new fabrication plant and the announcement of an ever-shrinking flash footprint, Spansion Inc. expects to maintain its dominating role in NOR memory, at least for the foreseeable future.