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Scientists Unveil Most Dense Memory Circuit Ever Made
adamlazz writes "The most dense computer memory circuit ever fabricated, capable of storing around 2,000 words in a unit the size of a white blood cell, was unveiled by scientists in California. The team of experts at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) who developed the 160-kilobit memory cell say it has a bit density of 100 gigabits per square centimeter, a new record. The cell is capable of storing a file the size of the United States' Declaration of Independence with room left over."
I assumed a word in the data storage sense. n bits to a word. Then I thought "wait a minute, which architecture?".
Reality is fluffy!
As a Read only option, I suspect. The problem isn't really data density, it's data access speed. Three terrabytes of storage isn't going to do you much practical good if it takes two hours to find and recover the bit of information you want.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
In all seriousness, I know how long a London Bus is, I know that an elephant is pretty heavy, I know roughly how much shelf space the Encyclopedia Britannica takes up and I know tall buildings can be quite tall.
But I have no real concept of how big a white blood cell is, or how much some thousand words (how many thousand? It's out my mind now that it's off the screen...) really is.
For all I know, the hard drive in my computer could be storing 600 birthday cards per germ already and I wouldn't have a clue.
Anyone care to quote how fast the Concorde went in Ford Escorts per millisecond? (the link will give you a good start)
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
- Is this volatile or non-volatile memory?
- What size word are they using?
- If non-volatile, what kind of endurance can be expected? What about data retention? It doesn't matter how small the memory is if the data only lasts 5 minutes. (Yes, I'm sure there would be applications even for that, but you get the point.)
- What are the write and read times?
- If volatile, does the data need to be refreshed continuously, or will it hold its value as long as power is applied?
- How much power is required for different operation?
Okay, so maybe I was expecting too much. But they could've at least given some of the most basic details, like word size (damned marketing dept!).Um... gigabits per square centimeter is a horrible storage density metric. We need to deal with volume - unless we suddenly moved to a 2-dimensional universe - and even volume isn't perfect. For a drive platter do you only count the magnetic medium, or the underlying material as well? What about the space between platters or the read/write mechanism? I could have great storage density, but it wouldn't do me much good if I needed an entire scanning tunneling microscoope to read it.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.