Cheaper DNA sequencing possible with computer chip technology

 The same machine decoded the E. coli strains from a recent outbreak in Germany in a matter of hours, and is drawing praise for its novel approach to reading DNA.
But in the goal to bring the price point down to $1,000 per genome, some caution not to get too excited—yet.
Unlike some of its other competitors, the Ion Torrent machine uses semiconductor chip technology to read DNA—this Nature News article explains how DNA is washed across a $99 computer chip with more than a million tiny wells (the chips were $250 not too long ago).
Such chips tend to get cheaper with time. Their cost roughly follows “Moore’s law” (named for the Intel co-founder) that predicts the number of transistors that can fit on a computer chip approximately doubles every two years.
So even though the latest demonstration of Moore’s genome wasn’t cheap, the technology has room to cut costs in time. The project cost about $200,000, a representative for Ion Torrent said; but redoing the project with a newer chip, with about 10 times greater capacity, would lower the cost to about $70,000.
One researcher says that the cheap cost appears to come with drawbacks in accuracy. Daniel MacArthur, a genomics researcher, had this to say in his Wired Science blog:
“Let’s be very clear about this up front: by modern standards, this is a poor-quality genome. … The yield of the Ion platform (in terms of bases per dollar) is of course going up rapidly, but I think it’s important to emphasise that Ion Torrent is not yet a remotely competitive technology for affordable whole human genome sequencing.”
Affordable sequencing would pave the way for personal genomics. And in case you were wondering about the billionaire’s genes, here’s what the analysis revealed: a typical amount of freckling, high chance of brown eyes, risk for fungal nail infection and an increased risk for mental retardation (which clearly did not come to fruition).

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Micron develops 'Hyper Memory Cube' technology

Memory-chip maker Micron has unveiled a new hybrid memory technology that it claims should offer a 20-fold performance boost over chips currently used in personal computers, while reducing the size of the chip and consuming about one-tenth of the power. Speaking to Cnet, the company said its development breaks a longstanding problem referred to as the "memory wall" to deliver "a staggering amount of DRAM bandwidth directly to the processor."

Essentially, DRAM performance today is constrained by the capacity of the data channel that sits between the memory and the processor. This channel often becomes a choke point for data, no matter how much faster the DRAM chip itself gets, which was more recently evidenced in the industry's slow transition from DDR2 to DDR3 as desktop and notebook makers weren't really seeing a big enough improvement to warrant the move.

There isn't much in the way of technical details at the moment but it would appear that Micron is leveraging memory architecture knowledge from its Numonix acquisition last year to stack several memory layers atop each other and adding a controller chip right into the memory substrate. This not only allows a higher speed bus that will go from the controller chip to the CPU, it also means that memory could be packed more densely in a given volume.

The company hopes to see the so-called "Hybrid Memory Cube" technology in server and networking markets as early as 2012, with significant volumes in 2013, and could then start to work their way toward the consumer space in 2015.

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