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NEC ships next-generation memory chips

NEC has begun shipping next-generation memory chips that hold 64 times more data than today's chips.

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Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers
NEC has begun shipping next-generation memory chips that hold 64 times more data than today's chips, heralding the day when PCs ship with hundreds of megabytes of memory.

The new memory chips are 256-megabit Dynamic RAMs (DRAM). Current chips in most PCs shipped within the last two years use 4-megabit DRAMs. The market is just now beginning a shift to 16-megabit DRAMs.

The Japanese company is shipping "samples" of these new DRAMs.

The 256-megabit chips will be the same size as today's 4-megabit memory chips but through new chip designs and improved manufacturing techniques, they are able to hold 64 times the data of 4-megabit chips.

In addition to meeting the demand for large amounts of memory in future PCs, these chips are also expected to be used in compact, portable computing devices that require lots of memory to run multimedia applications but have a limited amount of internal real estate.

These chips are also expected to be fast. NEC's sample chips run many times faster than today's memory chips.

NEC plans to begin commercial production of the new chip in the second half of 1998.