ABC News posted a short item on a technology that IBM is working on... "magnetic RAM"... which would prevent you from losing the contents of memory when you cut the power, thus providing you with an "instant on".
Scientists at IBMs Almaden Research Center say they have now fabricated a crude magnetic RAM prototype containing 500 working memory cells (each cell represents a bit of memory) by sandwiching aluminum between ultrathin layers of a ferromagnetic metal alloy. The prototype has storage density as good as DRAM (dynamic random access memory), the most common type of semiconductor memory, but reads and writes information 20 times faster while consuming less than than one hundredth the energy.
