Slashdot Mirror
New Material for Spintronics Discovered
Cpt_Corelli writes "Researchers at Uppsala University and the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology have discovered a new material with properties suitable for creating spintronic devices at room temperature. Previously this was only believed to be available at very low temperatures. The material is a combination of zinc oxide and manganite. The breakthrough is the cover item of the October issue of Nature Materials. If this new material proves viable for production there is an enormous potential for smaller and faster processors. Could this be the beginning of a new era in processor development?"
things will get faster
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
The subatomic part of the atom would store the information, and the electron would act as the bus to carry information in and out of the nuclear subsystem
It's actually a disguised, mobile WoMD!
Why does this sound suspiciously like some washing machine technology gone totally mad?
Diamond based, nano-molecuar, photonic, quantum computers with Spintronics also in a big bewulf cluster and runing Linux.
Does that make the people who discovered this Spin Doctors?
whacka whacka whacka
does that finding has something to do with a arm and a very complex processor found crushed in a automated factory ?
Dear Sir,
we appreciate your effort in describing the storage capacity in units that the layman can understand. In the future please try to express the quantities in IT-friendly terms such as "Gigabyte", "Megahertz", or "bushel".
Sincerely,
Mr Blinky
Gordon Moore heaves a sigh of relief.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Wow #1: MR hard drives already use spintronics?!
Wow #2: MRAM = nonvolatile memory 50 times faster than DRAM?! AND 10 times denser?!
Wow #3: MRAM in production by 2005?!
Does this spell the end for our Dynamic(RAM) Duo? Tune in tomorrow, because it sounds like everything's going to change overnight!
Wowsers!
"This is not a sig." -- R.
"Finally, imagine a computer memory thousands of times denser and faster than today's memories. And nonvolatile, so it retains its contents when the power is off."
When reading this does the dying scene in Bladerunner come to mind?
But, the LOC is the standard unit for measuring unquantifiably huge amounts of storage since (a) no-one knows exactly how big a LOC is, so they cannot dispute your estimate, and (b) the LOC always gets larger, and thus the estimate of "I can fit N LOCs into that space", where N is an integer between 1 and 100, remains accurate despite the logrithmic nature of storage growth.
I for one have never been able to convert LOCs to bushels, and I have no intention of starting now!
Ceci n'est pas une signature
No, it means when the benefits of spintronics have been exploited research will proceed to store information in quarks and whatever lies beneath, data transfer will be instantaneous through some weird particle entanglement. And someone will say "6*10^23 bits inside a few grams of silicon will be enough for everyone", and few years later he will be laughed at.
the most sexp i get is my paren-mode.
At the moment (2:30 PM CET) Southern Sweden is without electricity due to a giant power failure. So either this discovery already starts showing its evil consequences, or the Slashdot effect now reaches further than just web sites...
-- Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
"Could this be the beginning of a new era in processor development?"
It'll have to join the queue, _behind_ optical computers and quantum computers, I'm still waiting for what they promised...
YAW.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
You spin me right round baby right round like an electron baby right round round round.......
DIE 80's DIE.
"Comedy's a dead art form. Now tragedy, that's funny."
I hope by the time they make an actual product out of this, the paperless office will have become a reality. Otherwise, I'll have a big problem finding my PC on the desk.
Am I the only one who clicked on the Swedish link and got a flashback to muppets?
It's a pity Mendeleevium has such a short half-life, or you could try the experiment and see if it works even better than Manganese.
Paul
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
At first glance, I misread that as reading "New Material for Sphincters Discovered".
The obvious comment, which I was (and obviously still am) morally compelled to make was: "Well it's about time! That manned mission to Uranus has been on the drawing board for decades!" or something to that effect.
Yes, well... As you were.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
In the eternal struggle between hardware engineers trying to make everything faster, and software engineers trying to make everything slower, the hardware engineers have struck yet another grave blow.
Fortunately, I'm hard at work on a new O(n^2) sort algorithm:
1) Completely randomize list.
2) In order traversal looking for out-of-order entries. If one is found return to step 1.
It's no slower than bubble sort, but it eliminates those pesky "best cases".
I'm also planning an operating system that uses an XML-based executable format, and "network RAM" protocol that uses XSLT to access memory paged over an HTTP connection.
Admittedly, it's a big project. We are going to need lots of volunteers if we want to get there before Longhorn.
Liberty you never use is liberty you lose.