Micron this week announced financial results for its fourth fiscal quarter and 2011 fiscal year ended September 1, 2011, and the numbers aren't pretty. The company's revenue from DRAM in the third quarter dropped 12 percent compared to Q3, a slump Micron said was the result of declines in the average selling prices. Revenue from sales of NAND flash products picked up some of the slack and grew 11 percent, but doesn't have enough volume to make up for the downturn in DRAM.

One of the many awesome things coming out of this year's Intel Developer Forum (IDF) is a new DRAM concept Intel claims will deliver a 7-fold improvement in energy-efficiency over today's DDR3 modules. It's called Hybrid Memory Cube and Intel is working closely with Micron to turn this concept into a shipping product. So what exactly is a Hybrid Memory Cube?

Micron is making the claim that its new RealSSD P320h solid state drive series is the world's fastest enterprise SSD line built to take advantage of the PCI Express bus. These new drives come in 350GB and 700GB capacities, use 34nm single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory chips, and offer up to 3GB/s of sustained data throughput, more than double that of the nearest competitor, Micron says.

Micron on Wednesday introduced a new portfolio of its RealSSD line, these newest models the first to incorporate the company's 25nm NAND flash technology.

Capacities range from 64GB to 512GB and come in both the 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors. All of the new drives support SATA 6Gbps, just like the previous generation RealSSD models, but these latest units are 17 percent faster than before, Micron says. Depending on capacity, drive speeds come rated at up to 415MB/s (the flagship 512GB model comes rated at up 260MB/s write speeds, a 20 percent increase over the C300).

Micron said it's currently working with notebook makers to qualify its new RealSSD drives under the C400 product name. Samples have already started shipping and the memory maker expects mass production to begin next month.