Re: *Licensable* design techniques *multiply* memory life by 10 000x
The fact is, that in computing my current computer is something like 500-1000 times faster than the first computer I ever owned, and has four cores (eight hyperthreaded) capable of that speed without even struggling. It has something like 300,000 times as much RAM as my first computer and a nearly a thousand times more storage, in units that didn't even exist when I was younger. My internet connection is something like 5000 times faster than my first Internet connection.
When an industry is this young, it's not hard to have huge multiples in performance. The first car was infinitely faster than any car before it. The second car probably went ten times or more faster. It's after that initial "burst" that things settle down (and thus things like CPU speed and RAM have stagnated in recent years). The first plane barely got off the ground, modern planes break the speed of sound if required.
And this isn't a factor of speed, or limited by aerodynamics, or some huge feat of science. It's making a relatively new and unresearched product (that, in one form or another, preceded even my first computer) to be more tolerant to long-term use. That's an entirely different statistic to increase, and far less interesting. The first car probably had a life-span of 10 minutes before it went boom. The second probably lasted a couple of days. Now we routinely get 100,000 miles out of them.
Multiples are a bad statistic to compare too, because they bias towards smaller improvements at lower figures. You won't get a 10-fold increase on the "new" MTBF if it turns out to be true, because that's so much more difficult and would be almost untestable (and thus, unlikely to ever happen). But you might well get an increase of 5-10 times in capacity of SSD's in the next couple of years.