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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.)
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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?
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...
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The interesting point about the semiconductor market that makes it different from almost anything else is that it pay's to drive down the price as your cost decreases.
The reason being that the market thereby grows at a much faster rate, more than compensating the price drop. Remember Profit in $ is Unit profit * Unit.
Just look at Cell Phones as a good recent example. Industries has repeatedly learned that artificially holding the price high kills you. If interested in more info Google Clayton Christenson + Disruptive technologies.
Help fight continental drift.
You'll see far more than that, if history is any indicator. I've got 64 megs of RAM in my video card, for chrissakes. I have spent upwards of a grand for half a meg of main memory.
For bulk storage, I can buy disks for less than a dollar a gigabyte today. I spent over a grand for the first one gig drive I ever bought.
So yeah, you'll see a 5X savings. Count on it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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
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.
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.