Further proof that US companies are oblivious to English as spoken by the rest of the world (ie. the vast majority) has emerged.

Intel has never been great with product names, but at least they've stayed away from the risible unlike Microsoft which is quite happy marketing OneCare for instance.

That was broken recently, when head boffin Justin Rattner launched Phase-Change RAM.

Instead of calling it PC-RAM however, Intel went with PRAM. Oh dear. I suppose "perambulator" and its abbreviated form has disappeared from American usage.

Either way, this unfortunately named memory technology could be good because:

PRAM is based on chalcogenide glass, which can be altered using the heat generated by an electric current. Heat changes the physical structure of the glass to either a crystalline or amorphous state. Each of these states has a distinct electrical resistance that is used to represent the ones and zeroes needed to represent stored data in binary terms.

Chalcogenide! Wonderful.

The key point of PRAM is that it's faster than today's non-volatile FLASH memory, and could possibly end up as a replacement for Dynamic RAM.

That'd be something else - a computer that you can switch off without worrying about the memory contents. I'd like that.