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Buckminsterfullerene Strikes Again - Nanotube RAM
putaro writes "Nanotube based RAM, under development by Nantero, promises to deliver densities of over 1 terabit per cm^2, is non-volatile and faster than current DRAM. The Economist has a nice story. Forget about just kicking DRAM's and FLASH's butt, is this finally the end of magnetic storage as well?"
How is that informative? "I hope it would be compatable with existing memory systems, though. It would be nice to just swap out existing RAM for a NanoRAM module and get an instant performance and capacity boost"???
Maybe you didn't notice - it said TERABIT/cm^2. Your current system probably can't handle more than 2Gig of RAM - let alone hundreds and hundreds of gig. Hell, your BIOS may not even be able to handle a HD that large.
I mean, really. 100x faster, and >1000x the storage. Think about that for a minute. Who gives a fuck if you have to toss your HUGE SLOW FUCKING SYSTEM and buy a new one?
If they do pull this off (and I think they're blowing smoke), it will make today's computers look like the vacuum tube machines of yore.
Hope to drop in upgrade... Come on.
Anything that dense and that much faster than existing memory technologies will need a different memory controller. No getting around it.
The fact that AMD built a memory controller into the Opteron is not necessarily something to be happy about. On the one hand, it greatly reduces latency of memory reads/writes, on the other hand you can't upgrade the memory speed beyond what your entire CPU supports -- you have to upgrade your entire CPU. Which means AMD has to redesign the CPU to take advantage of faster (or different types of) memory. And Opterons aren't that cheap yet...
Well, maybe not a drop in ram replacement, but how about a solid-state ide/scsi drive? Memory blocks, so to speak...
Look, you're missing the point. This would represent a fundamental change in computing. 1 terabit/cm^2. Imagine having 50 GBytes on your wristwatch.
Half a terabyte on your cell phone.
As many terabytes as you can imagine on a laptop that runs for a day because it doesn't have a HD and all the RAM is NVRAM, and it's 100 times faster than your current system.
Really. Think about it. Who gives a shit if you can upgrade your current machine. Did you see the article recently about AppleII users getting together? You'd look as silly as any of them... (no offense - I've run a IIe emulator within the past 3 months, and it was fun; a lot like it will be amusing to be able to store all of silentbozo's files on my cell phone many times over)
Although your right the 1000x thing and 100x thing were potentials they expect within the next few years, right now they said it was 20x faster then the fastest memory on the market today, so it will be bigger capacity although they didn't say how much bigger, and it will be quite a bit faster.
The hardware aside, in software this memory could easily replace the hd and ram, at least on a linux system. The problems I see are that all software is currently designed to use both memory and disk as if they are two separate things... and to use one device in place of both would require a rewrite. In linux talking to hardware is done through the kernel, so changes to the kernel to "emulate" ram could get this hacked into usability fairly quickly. It could allow the amount to use as ram to be passed as a kernel parameter.
Replacing SDRAM (or RAMBUS or whatever) with some type of NVRAM will require a whole new approach to security. Otherwise, when you go home at night, what's to stop me from booting your computer (off a CD or floppy if it's reasonably secure), or rebooting it if you left it running but locked, and running an app that allocates a couple gigs of memory without initializing it then lets me browse it?
Technically, you're right. If someone wanted real security, they would have to make some changes to the OS&Apps and/or system acritecture.
But really, you have to look at the reality of your system right now. Unless your disk is encrypted, and you need something like a smartcard to access the data, you're hosed if someone gets physical access to your machine even once.
There's nothing that stops them popping open your case or booting from CD and copying your whole HD onto their Ipod or whatever. Even if the important bit of info they want is your password, they can always install a keylogger, and have that send them an email with your password (or even post is to a messageboard somewhere, just to aviod being traced).
Actually, I'm willing to state a stronger case. You are screwed if someone can get (unsupervised) physical access to your machine. Period. Even if you encrypt everything. There are so many clever things someone could do to your system in order to get your data that you just could never know you're safe.
I mean, even if you have the system wipe passwords from this new RAM on power down, it won't protect you. I could just open up your case, and stop the clock. All of a sudden, none of that stuff designed to wipe your data is working. I can then hook a logic analyzier and pattern generator up to your RAM, and just read out all your data. If your system wipes its RAM too frequently for that, I could just have an ASIC fabbed and put in on a little board which plugs in between your motherboard, and your RAM.
The only way to stop this is to basically turn your RAM into and uber-smartcard, but even then, it's possible to hack a smartcard too.
I guess my point is your thoughts are basically academic. Yes, this tecnology would add another way to exploit physical access to a PC, but there are already so many of those that I really don't think it matters. The only way you're going to get real security from someone with physical access to the system is to encrypt all chip-to-chip interconnections, and use whatever neat packaging technology the military uses for the chips in its military GPS units. Not very likely to happen.
Life is too short to proofread.
Well, if you use an 8 terabyte equivalence for 1 Library of Congress (the actual definition seems to be a bit slippery, and that's the first one I found on a Googling)...
.62 to .73 inches thick, but since we don't know how thick nano-ram is, let's just assume a wafer the size of an iPod).
Theoretical Nano-Ram storage capacity == 1x10^12 bits / cm^2
1x10^12 bits = 1.25x10^11 bytes = 116.4 Gigabytes
That's 0.114 Libraries of Congress per cm^2.
An iPod, according to Apple's website, is 4.1 by 2.4 inches (it's also
1in = 2.540cm
4.1in = 9.840 cm
2.4in = 6.096 cm
Let's chop a cm off each of those to account for the casing, structural bits, and soldering points that aren't actually storage space. That gives us a size of 8.840cmx5.096cm for our hypothetical nanoPod (so on a tangent, how long before some company introduces the new 'e' and starts dubbing products 'nRAM', the 'nPod', 'nTel nSide', etc?). That's a surface area of 45.049cm^2.
Given our previous determination that we can store 0.114 LoC on 1cm^2, we arrive at a figure of 5.136 LoC/i(or LoC/n for nPod, as the case may be).
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
First, I have to confess that I am a Materials Engineer and not some ubergeek with a CSE degree.
But it's a definite fact that technological advances are only made possible with the precedence of metallurgical advances.
Silicon wafers today wouldn't exist without the metallurgical backing to create high purity Silicon, Aluminum, and so on.
The point being that with the discovery of the buckey ball, we are entering a new age of history. We're not there, but we're working on it really hard.
Before you toss me out as flamebait consider that each primary age of human civilization is named as a metallurgical Age: Bronze, Iron, Steel. Some might argue that we are in the Silicon Age right now. However, the impact of Silicon is not as ubiquitious as the impact of the discovery of Bronze, Iron, or Steel.
But the Buckey Ball is going to be similar in the scope of impact as Steel or Iron. Why?
- Structural Materials
- Electronics
- Optics
- Aerospace
It's a FUNDAMENTALLY new material product available for the engineers to play with.