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IBM Says Polymer Memory Could Be Ready By 2005

Posted by timothy on from the my-brain-awaits-an-upgrade dept.

prostoalex writes "Polymer memory is hardly anything new, and we already had HP and Princeton announcing their prototype. In a Forbes magazine article IBM promises polymer memory that's five times cheaper than current flash memory, and expects the first devices with polymer data storage systems to be delivered possibly by 2005. IBM's Zurich Lab published this article last year with description of Millipede."

2 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Ram _I_ want to see. by Jestrzcap · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I want to see a RAM tech that allows for non-volitle (i.e. keeps its data even without power), and unlimited re-rewrites. This would be a great tech for laptops or PDAs as they could suspend very very easily and boot up to same state. This would be a fabulous tool as battery tech seems to be going nowhere fast.

    --
    "I have great faith in fools: Self confidence my friends call it." ~Edgar Allan Poe
  2. Millipede Project by Lomby · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This year I had the chance to go to the VLDB (Very Large Databases) conference in Berlin. The keynote speech was about this Millipede project.

    I must say everybody in the audience was really impressed: from one side the technological aspects, bordering on nanotechnology, were very interesting. Seeing almost the same principle of vinyl discs miniaturized is really fascinating.
    The other really interesting point is the impact that such a storage system will have for our systems.
    Imagine, you have 10 Tb of space: what will change in the way you handle data? Probabily the first impact will be the disappearance of the deletion of files: why not keep all the old versions of a file if you have all this space? We could use it as we use packet writing on a CDRW. Or what if your iPod could store some Terabytes of data and restit to a lot more of shock (acceleration)?

    The speaker made clear that the storage capacity is huge, but the performances are more or less the same of an HD from today: still the Millipede is highly parallelizable.

    I think we must see these new storage technologies not merely as bigger HD, but as something different, with lot of space, but with a bit less of performance.

    If you see it from a business perspective, remember that IBM sold its HD division to Hitachi about one year ago: it seems clear that they are going to concentrate themselves on new storage technologies.

    Anyway, the future looks really interesting!