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Data Transfer Has A Speed Limit
ChrisHanel writes "Yahoo News is reporting that despite the infinite climb data speeds seem to be making, scientists at Stanford say we'll eventually hit a barrier due to the inability to keep the data stable after a certain transfer speed. But no worries just yet; the watermark they've set is still 1,000 times faster than what we have now." Apparently: "The scientists confirmed this problem by firing up the particle accelerator at Stanford University and blasting electrons at a piece of the magnetic material used to store computer data."
While it does say that using the current magnetized bit storage system has a speed limit that is 1000 times the current, it is only with this method of storage. Hopefully by the time we could hit this limit we will have a new method of storage. Besides, if my data could be written at 1000x the max of current maybe I won't need memory any more (or maybe our storage will be memory). Anyone have any ideas what we will be storing at that speed? (other than everything happening around us and everyone else so we have instant replay on life).
"The scientists confirmed this problem by firing up the particle accelerator at Stanford University and blasting electrons at a piece of the magnetic material used to store computer data." I wish I had a particle accelerator just lying around, that'd be sweet.
However, Seagate's chief technology officer, Mark Kryder, said the project had few real implications for the data-storage industry.
"Certainly we are not going to start packaging linear accelerators into hard disk drives,
Fools, cutting themself out of the linear accelerator harddrive market already. I'm switching to WD..This kind of thing crops up now and again in lots of fields. It's basically the same problem that keeps being predicted with our Interstate Highway system. There's a safe limit as to the speed that we can have cars travelling, and if the highways fill up, bumper to bumper all moving at that speed, we've reached capacity.
The most obvious solution there is the same as the obvious solution here: Add more lanes. If you have thirty-two lanes of traffic instead of one, you've increased your capacity roughly 32 times. Same situation here: Transmit 32 bits in parallel (simultaneously) down distinct channels, rather than in serial (one at a time).
Just as building more lanes is expensive, here the expense comes in multiplying all of the necessary hardware to handle wider data busses for as far down the path as necessary to deal with more data in parallel. Right now, we've got parallel busses inside our PCs, but the bits often end up serialized at some point inside our processors, down at the microcode level. All of these bottlenecks need to be categorized and eliminated to overcome such a theoretical data transfer limit. It will be neither easy nor inexpensive, especially when we decide we need to send and process, say, 2048 bits in parallel in order to meet our data processing needs. At some point, it becomes more economical to separate things on a higher level (add more processors, or add more PCs), similar to building additional highways rather than just adding lanes.
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks.
Wow, tautological perfection. I've never seen such.
Yes, we can always show some (incomplete) "proof" that we can't do X. And then we usually end up doing X in a novel and unexpected way.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
And, BTW, FYI, FWIW, Moore's "law" is more of an empirical observation than any sort of real law, much less one that would apply in this case of magnetics without a transistor in (relevant) sight. I don't mean to detract from the clever, albeit obvious in hindsight, prediction of Moore. He simply observed (and presciently predicted) that there is (and will continue to be) a sustained exponential growth in the number of transistors per integrated circuit (that's "switches" per "chip" to you and me).
That has absolutely not one goddamn thing to do with this topic or the cited article, so STFU or RTFM first. Please.
everything in moderation
(very slightly off topic... sorry.) I attended a physics colloquium the other week in which a professor from Duke was presenting the results of his research into the question of whether information could be sent faster than light through the various ways of coaxing wave speeds to be faster than c in anomalously dispersive media. If you concoct a medium in which the index of refraction decreases as the wavelength of light increases, the "group velocity", or the speed at which pulses propagate, can be made to be faster than c. The "phase velocity", or the velocity at which each frequency of light propagates, is still less than c, but the pulse that each frequency is a part of is going faster than light. The problem is that for the most part, the shape of a wave is pretty deterministic once you've seen a fairly small sample of the waveform. So recieving just the first few microseconds / nanoseconds / etc. of the pulse tells you everything about all of the frequencies which make it up. But he added a nondeterministic part to the signal he sent (through this anomalously dispersive media), changing the shape of the pulse midstream depending on whether he was sending a "1" or a "0". He then timed how long it took before his detector could tell whether the incoming pulse was a "1" or a "0", and determined that despite the media appearing to emit the pulse before it recieved the pulse, his detector still could not differentiate between a "1" and a "0" faster than the speed of light. So Einstein (and Maxwell) continues to be vindicated, and information cannot possibly travel faster than the speed of light.
I might point out that all natural laws are derived strictly through empirical observation. In fact, that's the very definition of such a law.
Moore's Law is what an engineer would call a "rule of thumb." Something which is understood not to be a law, but within certain constraints can be treated as if it were. This observation is included in the full version of Moore's Law, as actually written by Moore himself.
Like Newton's Law of Gravity, which can be applied as if it were law, so long as you are not Mercury, as was in noted by Newton himself in his original statement of his law.
The writers of laws are not to be held accountable for the misinterpretations of others.
None of this has much of anything to do with the article either (nor does the heading under which the story appears, which is what the OP was responding to, which is perfectly valid). However, I do not believe STFU is an argument, so I will not apply it to myself, or you for that matter.
Post on, McDuff.
KFG
Comment removed based on user account deletion
well, no. bandwidth in this context is the time taken for it to be sent from origin A to destination B. origin being time taken to write the dvds, get them to the plane, load, flight time, unloading, haulage to destination, then read.
Doesn't make much sense otherwise.
No. You are wrong. Quantum entanglement does not lead to faster-than-light data transfer. See here: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?numb er=612
Moore's Law should be put in the realm of economics, just as Say's Law. It is an observation on the _Behaviour_ of producers, who cater for a certain known demand and bet that their R&D expenses are reimbursed by higher prices for faster products. Because everybody is doing it, investing less means loosing market share, investing too much does not increase profits proportionately.
Some people seem to think that it is an physical law, because it has to do with microprocessors. if someone does make such an mistake, he deserves a STFU, as not to influence others with his uninformed opinion.
maybe the grand-parent-article thinks the barrier is temporary, and can be technically solved. RTFA:
"In order to go beyond this limit, some completely new technology will be required, of which we do not know anything yet," Pescia wrote.
we can not make affirmative statements on unknowns. THAT is ignorant.
as an economist, i say, that putting faith in economic laws is a receipt for failure, eventually ( at lim t-> infinite).
Fight Frist Psoting!
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