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."

Comments

Recycle time?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Ram _I_ want to see.

[Jestrzcap]

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.

Millipede Project

[Lomby]

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!

Re:Hmmm. Cheap long term storage?

[MarkusQ]

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:

1. Have room for improvement
2. Serve a niche market that the others can't
3. 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

Re:This is why video compression will soon not mat

[Imperator]

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.