HP Labs Creates Densest Memory Chips To Date

Ruger writes "CRN has this article about memory circuits 10 times more dense than today's silicon chips. R. Stanley Williams, director of Quantum Science Research at HP Labs said the high-density memory his team created fits inside a square micron. That's so small that 1,000 of the circuits could fit on the end of a strand of human hair."

Comments

A single strand of hair

[addps4cat]

Once again they use "a single strand of hair" as some sort of SI unit. Something isn't small until you tell someone how many you can fit on a strand of hair.

- phranck@nycap.rr.com

Re:A single strand of hair

[sh4de]

The obvious derivative unit for memory density would then be libraries of congress per strand of hair.

Humour aside, I think it's the marketing department again that thought people wouldn't grok units that look like bits per square micron.

That sort of unit isn't immediately accessible to most people, but messing with highly inaccurate, almost metaphorical, made-up units ain't gonna make it any better.

(My two bits per strand of hair)

Re:A single strand of hair

[Quikah]

Oh come on, most people DON'T grok how small a micron is. It makes perfect sense to relate it to something which people can see and touch. It really makes no sense to criticize making something a little more understandable to lay people. It is an AP story, not a research paper.

hope their resumes are ready

[garyrich]

I thought Carly and the honchos from Compaq were killing all hardware level design work. This may be the last hurrah from HP Labs.

Someone is one smart moderator.

[Bingo Foo]

I'd sincerely like to thank the moderator who called this very little joke "overrated" at +4.

Linearly additive, [-1,5] integer moderation is broken. I would love to see, as part of the "about" or "faq" on the left of /. pages, a statistical abstract of post moderations. At the very least, I'd like to see a histogram of posts' scores. I'll bet there are far more 5's than there are 3's. That's just plain wrong.

This isn't about karma, its about ordering the relevance/importance/whatnot of posts, and these are separate issues from posters' karma. What's a slashdotter to do? My personal leaning is toward lobbying Taco to implement log(percentile) scoring, maybe just as a user preference. Or skinnable scoring with user-defined functions, whaddaya think Taco?

IIRC, there were a lot of posters here circa the 2000 elections with all kinds of ideas on equitable voting schemes. Put some of that experience into devising a better moderation scheme and deluge the editors with stories and "ask slashdots" about it.