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The University of Pennsylvania has issued a news release stating that they have created a new form of nonvolatile memory that can revolutionize the industry. According to the news release, scientists at Penn have developed nanowires capable of storing computer data for 100,000 years and retrieving that data a thousand times faster than existing portable memory devices such as Flash memory and micro-drives, all using less power and space than current memory technologies.
If this technology comes to pass, it will have drastic changes in computer science. Currently there is a trade-off between speed and stability. Non-volatile memory is not nearly as fast as volatile memory which is why computers currently have hard drives and RAM. Modern computer processors have small caches on-chip that can be accessed in matter of a few clock cycles and RAM that can be accessed in hundreds or thousands of clock cycles. Both of those types of memory are volatile and lose their memory when power is no longer being actively applied to the memory chips. Non-Volatile memory is primarily flash or magnetic (regular Hard Drives). It can take hundreds of thousands or millions of clock cycles to access main memory (whether flash or magnetic).
Modern digital cameras are only capable of taking a small number of simultaneous pictures before they run out of buffer room and have to pause to write the pictures to memory. Another consideration (more important in my mind) is the fact that this new memory technology is low-power. Computers currently use a lot of power and they don't show any signs of slowing down consumption. Decreasing the amount of power required for data encoding and memory use can help drastically reduce the overall power consumption.
The only downside to this technology is that it will likely take up to ten years before it is available on the commercial market. Nanotechnology seems to be the wave of the future, however, so it is likely that many new computing technologies will come out of the nanotechnology field in the next several years.