Slashdot Mirror
IBM Says Polymer Memory Could Be Ready By 2005
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."
It's more than one "mer".
(Forecasting clueless Best Buy employees trying to sell computers.)
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Somehow I doubt that I - Mr. Consumer - will see the 5X price drop. I won't hold my breath.
IBM's Millipede May Challenge Flash Memory Tonya Vinas, 12.24.03, 4:06 PM ET
Some say The Information Age began with the invention of the PC. For others, it's the birth of the Internet, the development of the silicon chip or the global crisscrossing of fiber-optic cable that shifted our societal pivot from goods-production to information management.
In a couple of years, IBM's Millipede data storage system might also enter the debate.
Millipede harkens back to the days of computers gleaning information from punch cards, but this time, the information is stored in nanometer-sized indentations in a thin polymer film. According to the company, Millipede has the potential to provide significantly greater storage capacity than flash memory at a lower price. Another advantage: smaller and easier-to-use devices.
"Imagine a video camera in which each segment you've recorded is displayed in a directory with a unique file name, instantly accessed, appended or erased at the push of a button," says Christopher Andrews, communications program manager for the Armonk, N.Y,-based company. "If you're on vacation and want to erase an old segment to make room for something new, there would be no need to hunt with 'rewind' and 'fast forward' to find the section of the tape you're looking for."
Devices such as video cameras, portable video players and portable music players need more storage memory than flash memory can provide at an acceptable price, Andrews says. That's why most devices use tape or optical disks to store information. If these devices used Millipede-based storage cards, they could be smaller and use less power in addition to allowing data to be stored in downloadable files.
"Millipede will likely offer a cost per gigabyte approximately five times cheaper than flash in high-end cards," Andrews says. "Millipede would make a lot of sense in devices like PDAs and smart phones."
Although other companies such as Hewlett-Packard (nyse: HPQ - news - people ) and Samsung are also pursuing probe-based data storage, IBM says it was among the first to invest heavily in research and development and is poised to be among the first to have probe-based devices on the market, possibly by 2005.
This year, researchers at IBM's Zurich lab began restoring and retrieving data files using Millipede technology. Much of the work on Millipede has taken place in Zurich, but other IBM locations are involved.
IBM plans to target flash memory immediately, a potential $10 billion market. Beyond that, Millipede could have implications in biotechnology and other nanotechnology fields.
Millipede is based on two "breakthrough technologies," according to IBM: thermomechanical recording, in which an extremely sharp tip on a microcantilever with an integrated heater makes and reads back nanometer-scale indentations in a specialized polymer film; secondly, creation and integration of thousands of thermomechanical probes in a micromechanical array, married with a micromechanical actuator that scans the probes over the polymer surface to store and retrieve data in various locations on the film.
IndustryWeek Magazine
2003 Penton Media
Provided By Pinnacor
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
Does this also mean that all the old fogey polyester clothes can be recycled and used for memory? And if so will their absence of clothing be considered flash memory?
And does anyone remember what crazy, non-magnetic-plate memory technologies that IBM was saying in 2001 would be ready by 2003?
Just checking.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
To capture the market, this stuff has to either be:
1. Cheaper than flash or HDs.
2. More durable than flash or HDs (or even CD/DVDs)
3. Be faster than flash/HDs/optical media.
By the time this stuff comes out, trying to beat one of the three is going to be tough - by that time all of those existing technologies will be VERY mature. I'm already able to buy hard drives for super-cheap, so logically, flash is the intended target. The question is, by the time this stuff comes out, will hard drives become so tiny, cheap, and robust, that it's not flash that is the main competitor, but magnetic hard drives?
Of course, if IBM wants to give me petabytes of super-stable long-term storage that will fit in a shoebox, and only cost me a few hundred dollars, who am I to argue? At the very least, if it can replace tape, that might be enough to ensure a place for it, assuming optical hasn't totally displaced that market by then...
Oh yes! And we can call those storage device CompactFlash cards, because they're compact, made of flash memory and card sha... Hey! Wiat a second... Sounds rather familiar...
Hate me!
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
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!
To capture the market, this stuff has to either be:
1. Cheaper than flash or HDs.
2. More durable than flash or HDs (or even CD/DVDs)
3. Be faster than flash/HDs/optical media.
Nope. Read The innovator's dilemma. All it has to do is:
- Have room for improvement
- Serve a niche market that the others can't
- Improve over time into something they aren't
Micro-computers (to use one of his examples) weren't cheaper (for the power), more durable, or faster than big iron. But they came in smaller increments and could serve markets that the big players couldn't...-- MarkusQ
Hard drives are great, mature technology, however, they--in my opinion--suck big time. First of all, they have moving parts making them prone to sudden death (thus why RAID exists). Second, they're slow as hell hence why people buy SCSI. But even SCSI isn't fast enough. I mean, nowadays the bottleneck for most computing tasks is the hard drive. Give me DDR RAM fast, solid state long-term storage and I'll be very happy.
As for CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, I burn a lot of them because they're so damn cheap. But I hate it. I once scraped off the surface of a CD-R coaster and almost cried at how easy the stuff flaked off. Not to mention there's no reasonable consensus as to how to properly label the damn things. I mean, you can't write on them, you can't label them...the only thing you can do is take a tiny sharpie and write on the inner circle, which doesn't do me much good. Even though there would be cost and size increases, I would love it if CDs and DVDs had caddies a la Mini Discs.
Yes, I agree these technologies are cheap and mature but I really wish there was some alternative. So, I for one welcome our new micro-millipede masters (terrible name, btw, I have centipedes in my apartment and they freak the hell out of me even though I know they're good to have around 'cause they eat other bugs).
When we have media that hold 100+ gigs rather than a niggly 5-10 gigs at the same price, compression will serve no useful purpose.
You're obviously not a programmer. Video is something that places demands on computing that grow to fill the available phenomenon. Double the available storage, and people will want twice the length of video, or twice the bitrate, or whatnot. It's an old phenomenon. As the amount of memory available has increased, so has the amount demanded by applications. To look at it another way, compare O(N^3) bubble sort to O(N log N) merge sort. Just because we have faster computers doesn't mean we can use inefficient algorithms. If I had a dime for every time I've heard some beginning programming student say "but with faster computers, why does time complexity matter?" I'd be, well, able to buy a cheap lunch.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
What about when you're downloading it ?
When we have media that hold 100+ gigs rather than a niggly 5-10 gigs at the same price, compression will serve no useful purpose.
I'm not sure about that. Uncompressed video is gigantic. Huge. An hour of uncompressed video takes up about 70 gb, assuming it's regular NTSC rez. Thus you could barely fit a movie on your 100 gig media. It's much better just to use high quality lossy compression, such as MPEG-2 or Xvid or soemthing. If you crank the bitrates high enough, there is no visible artifacting or quality loss.
I'd much rather have 10 hours of HDTV video rather than an hour of uncompressed. Uncompressed video will only be feasable once media can hold hundreds of gigabytes, rather than the 9 gigs that dual layer DVDs hold today.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Let me see. 720x480x2 (16 bit color) = 691200 = 675kB per frame. 24 frames per second for a Hollywood movie = 15.82 MB per second. Times 3600 for an hour is 55.62 GB without sound.
Therefore, a two-hour movie is 111.2 GB without sound. If we kind on sound and compress that, for the joy of having perfect DVD-level video, I'm not far from my original estimation.
If you get greedy and desire 24-bit color, that will cost more, 166 GB per two hours.
To a person surviving on $10,000/year, %100,000/year seems like more than they would ever need. Likewise a million/year to a person making $100,000 - but it never works that way. Expenses always expand to fill available income - just as storage needs always expand to fill available storage.
Seems as if you didn't read the article.
Millipede does have moving parts. The polymer moves under the needles, which read and write to it through heat.
They also mention that they've designed it to be resistant to external vibrations. Which implies that it could be adversely affected by some types of vibrations.
It also has an ability to be rewritten only about 100,000 times, apparently, making it not suitable as a hard disk replacement.
It seems as if this tech at least initially will be good for what IBM is saying it's good for: as a FLASH replacement, at least for some applications. It doesn't appear to be useful as a general-purpose storage device.
Hard drives aren't going bye-bye all that soon, it seems.
When ten movies fit on one disk/whatever without compression, giving crystal-clear video, no one will think "yes, let's compress that!".
No, when that happens, everyone will think "Hey! Let's increase the framerate, increase the pixels and increase the color depth, then compress it all so we can fit 100 of these better movies on the same device!". Currently, uncompressed NTSC video is about 18MBps, or 144Mbps, which is 18 times more data than a DVD video stream (which includes audio, subtitles and control data as well), and DVDs use the old MPEG2 compression algorithm. If you see occasional compression artifacts in your DVDs, you can be sure that if they compressed to the same data rate using MPEG4, the result would be perfect.
Looking into the future, assume we double the frame rate, increase resolution to 1080 lines, increase the color depth to 4 bytes per pixel, and store full-raster data, then the video data rate increases to about 300MBps. That would make an uncompressed two-hour movie over 2TB in size. Assuming storage sizes continue to double every 18 months, 2TB disks (or whatever) should be commonly available in 15 years. To get 10 uncompressed movies you'd need 20TB, so add another 3 years or so.
OTOH, if we can get 50:1 compression, that 2TB movie becomes a 43GB movie, and your 10-movie storage device is only a year or two away (since 200GB drives are pretty cheap now).
Further, it just doesn't make sense not to compress video. There is so much redundancy that can be discarded. I mean, even stills can be compressed dramatically without degradation, and think about how much similarity there is between each video frame and the next. Good codecs like MPEG4 can achieve 100:1 compression ratios with some degradation, or 50:1 with no perceptible degradation at all, and we can probably expect that to improve.
Video will be compressed. It's just dumb not to do it.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.