Dive Brief:

• Intel Corp. and Micron Technology Inc. said their new memory chips will be up to 1,000 times faster than the memory chips currently used in mobile devices.

• The companies say the chips — called 3D Xpoint — will also be able to store 10 times more data than dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips and retain data even after they’re powered off.

• The chips could bring dramatic performance gains to all kinds of high-tech products, the companies claim, as well as benefit applications that rely on finding patterns in large amounts of data, such as financial fraud detection.

Dive Insight:

However, the importance of the technology has yet to be proven. Several other companies have claimed huge advances in memory chips over the past few years.

Mark Adams, Micron's president, said of the technology, “This is a whole new paradigm." Adams predicts the technology will cause “a major disruption” in the memory-chip market.

IDC estimates about $78.5 billion worth of DRAM and NAND chips will be purchased in 2015.