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'Racetrack' Memory Could Replace Hard Drives?
Galactic_grub writes "An experimental new type of memory that uses nanosecond pulses of electric current to push magnetic regions along a wire could dramatically boost the capacity, speed and reliability of storage devices. Magnetic domains are moved along a wire by pulses of polarized current, and their location is read by fixed sensors arranged along the wire. Previous experiments have been disappointing, but now researchers have found that super-fast pulses of electricity prevent the domains from being obstructed by imperfections in the crystal."
...they've updated coil memory.
I remember reading some research a couple of years ago that somethign similar was done using 100km of optical fibre and a router programmed to keep sending the same stuff around the loop, or it could read it/write it as it came around.
In some ways being slower is definitely an advantage, even with 100km at 10Gb/s you don't have much storage when the bits are moving at the speed of light.
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
...vaguely reminiscent of "Bubble Memory" 25 years ago. And everyone was saying *that* was going to replace hard drives too.
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Anything would be better than the current way my hard drive works. Spinning discs on a platter?! A thousand moving parts?! What is this, the Stone Age?!
My work here is dung.
stores 1 bit per "core." The article is about a form of memory which continually cycles multiple bits stored as magnetic regions through a single physical ring. The OP is correct in that this is similar to cycling photons through an optical ring.
Looking back, this is all very similar to shift register memory, one of the earliest forms of solid state memory.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I just ping foreign servers a lot
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
"The question is can we fabricate media that are perfect or control the imperfections,"
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How racetrack-like are we talking about? Does it smell like spilled booze and horse puckey? Can I gamble away the kids' college money on it?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
nm
I will stop now before I make a simple grammatical error myself.
(yes, I know you're looking, hmm, hmm, must be one here somewhere)
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
I had *exactly* the same reaction.
Geez. Every 30 years, or so, everything old is new again. I'm getting tired of this constant repetition in life.
I mean, I was praying *never* to see bell-bottoms ever again, as long as I lived. Shudder.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
"...Magnetic domains are moved along a wire by pulses of polarized current..."
...
But with tachyon pulse we could reverse the polarity and
Sweeeeeeeet! Bubble memory is back.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
It reminds me of bubble memory technology from the early 80's. Back then a Multi-bus card had whole 512K of non-volatile memory for an 8086. Later versions got larger but the ever increasing density of eeprom/flash and disk media doomed it.
6F 9E A9 1E 96 9F 74 27 ED B8 81 6D 0C 4E 1E 78
My other Sig is a 229.
Magnetic memory went the way of the dodo a good 35 years ago.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I remember tearing apart a small one as a kid - out of a 100 lb 80 x 25 monochrome CRT. A bunch of wire in a foot square metal box.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The more they stay the same.
For those who don't know, delay line memories have been around for at least 50 years...
Kind of interesting that they are using an old concept with new technologies.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Bah, in my day, the REAL Stone Age, we had to etch hash marks into a nearby rock to save our data. You damn kids and your fancy, rewritable magnetic storage media.
Maybe it's obvious, but wouldn't carbon nanotubes be a prime suspect, here?
.f00Dave
Reduce, reuse, cycle
It's Shigawire!
This will bring us one step closer to the Dune Universe. I call dibs on the first load of Spice!
Generally known as n + 1 addressing, where n was how many operands had addresses in the instruction. Also used with drum memory, which was in the physical shape of a cylinder ion the one drum machine I used, but was mainly a head per track disk, so no seeking required. Some drums had multiple heads per track for some tracks to reduce latency further.
The optimization was great fun, my favorite part. You could make programs scream if you paid attention.
Infuriate left and right
I always wondered how he kept himself circulating in the Pattern Buffer for years and years.
"c = 300,000Km/s (2sf)
Does 100km in 1/3s"
Nope, 100km takes 1/3 of a millisecond or 3x10^-4 seconds
I quit!
The Story of Mel
And like bubble memory, it is volatile, maybe? Meaning that when the first power failure comes along - there goes your data?
... Feetlebaum!" - Spike Jones
"And at th finish line it's
If you have a million monkeys tatooing a million geeks, you could achieve, ah, roughly 50k letters per second?
Of course, there is the poo factor....
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
William Gibson had made a remark about computers and the hard drive, and he was fascinated to learn that the hard drives had a moving platter. He then likened them to Victorian age record players.
..........FULL STOP.
"Geez. Every 30 years, or so, everything old is new again. I'm getting tired of this constant repetition in life."
Starving for novelty, are we? The basic idea(s) may be the same but technology and science has improved since then. You should be glad people are still trying otherwise you'd still be playing with a slide rule.
Subject line says it all....
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Am I the only one reminded of Acoustic Delay Line Memory by this?
"Polarized current?" I simply can't stop laughing.
IANAN (neurologist), so if any are here, please answer me this: is this sort of keep-sending-signals-around-in-loops method at all like how human memory works? I've often pondered what sort of physical mechanism human memory operates under, as (AFAICT) there's nothing like a hard disk platter or RAM chip or any other sort of fixed array of bits (or other units of data) in the brain; it's just a bunch of neurons firing.
If there is such a similarity between this new technology and human memory, that might explain why I've got a nearly perfect audio memory (I can memorize rhythms and melodies, comedic timing, lines from movies, etc, and to a lesser extent spoken passages like lectures, quickly and easily) and also can never seem to get this damn music out of my head....
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
When I was working on the development of DEC's DHU-11 at their Acre Rd., Reading, UK plant, we had this real comedian on staff.
One day, when the first protoype of the DHU-11 (we're talking wire-wrap here) was to be demoed, he rigged up a little plastic pipe that ran from the backplane of the PDP 11/24 holding the prototype to a place just out of sight of the various higher-up mucky-mucks who were receiving the demo.
Right after the machine was fired up, he took a big drag on his cigarette and blew into the pipe. Smoke out of backplance, widespread panic in lab. I mean, we all know that ICs become useless after the magic smoke is released, and we were using some of the first 8751s Intel ever made.
After we staked him out over an ant hill, we went off for pints at the Swan at Streatley.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
I would hope if it was volitile, that nobdy would be stupid enough to publish an article suggesting it for use by hard drives. Odds are strong that it is non-volitile. This is especially true if the quote from IBM is acurate: "According to IBM, this type of magnetic memory could vastly simplify computers, and eventually replace all hard-disk drives."
On the other hand, more idiotic things have been done in the past.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
At least it'll make a crash a lot more fun to watch.
Have gnu, will travel.
What's scary is the story appeared in the Economist a week and a half before it appeared on slashdot.
lol, bubble WRAP plastic memory would be the shit! Just break the bubbles for all zeros, for each memory update just replace the sheet of bubble wrap and break all the appropriate bubbles again :D
but Twistor memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twistor_memory seems to be the concepttual predecessor, if not the ancestor, of this tech. Also, see http://www.eetimes.com/special/special_issues/mill ennium/milestones/bobeck.html an overview of bubble memory which also describes the "might have been" twistor tech.