MRAM: A paradigm shift in the making?

Freescale Semiconductor has managed to produce a marketable magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM), something that the industry has been working on for years. The Technology Review has a good article here.

MRAM uses magnetism instead of electricity, so it doesn't need constant power to keep from losing data. It has an access time of nanoseconds, so it's faster than flash RAM. It also doesn't degrade over time the way flash RAM does, making it a good choice for computer applications. Someday your laptop may have no moving parts and have a battery life measured in days. Or at least in tens of hours instead of 4 or 5 (on a good day ;).

There is a down side. Currently the chips max out at 4MB, and although the belief is that capacity could increase a hundred fold. The questions at this point are:

Will the materials currently used in the current chip scale down as chip features scale down?

Will the magnetic fields scale down, or the proper shape of the fields be easily determined, as the chip features scale down?

Assuming that the answer to both questions is yes, or that the solutions are relatively easy to find, MRAM is the answer to the instant-on computer and the no moving parts computer. If this pans out in the long run, the computer you use in five or ten years may have nothing in common with the computer you're reading this on.