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Inventor of GMR Bids To Shake Up Storage, Again
Nrbelex writes "Stuart S. P. Parkin, an I.B.M. research fellow largely unknown outside a small fraternity of physicists, thinks he is poised to bring about a breakthrough that could increase the amount of data stored on a chip or a hard drive by a factor of a hundred. This is the man who pioneered exploiting the giant magnetoresistance effect in the 90s, causing disk storage to jump ahead of the Moore's Law curve. If he proves successful in developing 'racetrack memory,' he will create a universal computer memory, one that can potentially replace DRAM and flash memory chips, and make a 'disk drive on a chip' possible. It could begin to replace flash memory in three to five years, scientists say."
Enough space for all the porn in the internet... at least for now.
three to five years again. Every revolutionary storage tech is always ready in "three to five years", and probably always will be :(
I already lose enough money at the racetrack, now I will be losing it on my computer too. =(
cac
What? All of you? You're all using this man's technology right now. Accusations of this product being vaporware do not account for the man's track record (no pun intended). You should all give this man a little credit, okay?
My blog
I made the mistake of RTFA, ensuring this wasn't the Frost Pist (tm), but what the article describes sounds like an interesting technology. The medium involves coiled wire on a silicon chip and "sliding" magnetic ones and zeros down "notches" in the wire.
FanFictionRecs.net
Ah yes, racetrack memory... just in time for the parimutuel betting scene in the new Tron movie. See: http://movies.ign.com/articles/819/819271p1.html/
If it means my computer gets to look like that thing from TFA, then I'm SO in!
Update of electronic devices typically takes quite a while. NAND flash was invented in the 1980s yet only really caught on in approx 2002.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
No. All peoples claims should be approached with a skeptic eye. What I will do is not discard this man as a crackpot immediately. Many men that have created great things also had crackpot ideas.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Imagine, 10,000GB of RAM.
I have that in my laptop. Unfortunately I only have a 2 gig harddrive but I do have 56k on my video card.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
A decade ago, terabytes were a lot more than a thousand bucks, for sure! So, drives have been getting bigger, it's just that, there's been a few releases of Windows along the way!
This is my sig.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
When I skimmed TFA, it states that this development will take microelectronics into the 3rd dimension, but doesn't really state how these magnetic loops translate into 3 dimensions... does anyone have a better reference for the technology? Also what kind of heat issues will arise (since packing they will be packing more transistors which presumably means more heat) and how can those be dealt with beyond the current ways of using massive cooling systems and shrinking the wire size?
The article talks about how great and fast this is going to be, but doesn't go into how one fabricates wire loops on a semiconductor die, or how one would stack them in 3 dimensions
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
If every 4mb of music you buy have costs $2, then your 16 Terrabyte Ipod would cost $4 million to fill up.
Extra capacity is useless if the cost of data is artificially inflated
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
No matter how famous and credible someone is if they invent something and sell the patent rights to a company that will just sit on it like most vaporware ends up, we'll never see it. Hopefully he's smarter than that (and not that much of a greedy jackass)
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
In the early 1960's Bell labs was researching bubble memory. By the early 80's, TI or Bell commercialized it but it was too slow and bulky except for limited use, like static telephone messages. Guess shrinking the wires/tube and magnetic domains sped it up quite a bit.
The truth is that most of the items are in RESEARCH. the 3-5 years is development time. And most of the items mentioned here for improvements HAVE lead to being in the field. Since this is from IBM, I am guessing that we will see it in 3-4 years. Hopefully, they do not lose control of it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What? All of you? You're all using this man's technology right now. Accusations of this product being vaporware do not account for the man's track record (no pun intended). You should all give this man a little credit, okay?
Yea, ok. It's funny you posted this although no any previous comment even attempted to doubt his credibility, you karma whore.
Even evolution happens in jumps, not gradually.
Example #1: Henry Ford. On one hand you have the assembly line, and on the other had you have that great piece of literature "The International Jew"
Untrue.
My blog
Five years! It's always Five Years!
By 2012 I expect to have, this super memory technology, solar cells with efficiency above 70% for pennies per watt, flying cars, paper thin televisions the size of my wall, fuel cell powered hybrid cars, batteries replaced by power cells that store more power, cost less, are infinitely rechargeable, and charge/discharge like capacitors -- plus several other things from the last few months of Slashdot.
Also the Mayan calendar will have expired, and the entire West Coast in to the Sierra Nevada mountains will be flooded, so I don't know how useful this all will be to me.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Me, I have to make do with a measly 64 bits!
Baboons are cute.
Imagine the social implications of the $50 5TB thumb drive...
"I was over at Jimmy's house yesterday and asked him to put some good stuff on my thumb drive. He gave me HD copies of the top 80 movies released in the past two years, plus 2000 of his favorite albums.
Meanwhile, a second thumb drive I keep clipped to my belt has been keeping an audio/video recording of the last 17 months of my life, nonstop."
Yeah, right.
Exactly. That assembly line shit was just completely out there. Several people each building a car is much better than one car being made by several people.
Read what the article actually says - "Mr. Parkin puttered for two years in a lab in the early 1990s, trying to find a way to commercialize an odd magnetic effect of quantum mechanics he had observed at supercold temperatures." Though he may have been absolutely critical to making GMR hard drives (I don't know the history) credit for discovery of GMR goes to Peter Grunberg and Albert Fert. You might be able to call Parkin the inventor of GMR hard drives, though.
"Hopefully he's smarter than that (and not that much of a greedy jackass)"
If he is working for IBM, then the patent won't even be his. Nor will he even have a say how and when it is used.
...that all peoples' claims be approached with a skeptic eye.
Blar.
Right now, most silicon industry executives and many, many silicon engineers are at an Expo in Santa Clara, CA. I just made sure that this story got passed to pretty much all of them, and it's probably going to be their dinner conversation for the next week. Given the state of the silicon industry, this is going to be IBM's skyrocket - anyone can make a Beowulf cluster (storm worm, anyone?); Many can make an MP3 player, OS, or word processor; Fewer still (yet still thousands worldwide) can design a processor, module, or ASIC; An elite few can develop "killer-application" "have-to-have-it" disruptive physical technologies. And one of the implications of Moore's Law regards what consumers demand - they demand higher and higher processing and information densities.
Now comes the MPAA and RIAA asking for damages and injunctive relief.
This speed and storage capacity and can only be used for downloading and pirating illegal copies of movies and music.
Therefore this must not be permitted to happen.
Fight Spammers!
The moral zeitgeist of the pre-WWII world was much more accepting for anti-semitism than it is today. Just read the works of otherwise well respected and much revered people that lived in the 19th/early 20th century and you can find examples of anti-semitism that was apparently common. Starting from Boleslaw Prus to the catholic church. Henry For was merely more vocal about it than others I guess.
Everyone should be judged according to the time they lived in. Darwin isn't judged negatively because he believed in the superiority of white men either, because that was the commonly accepted view of his age.
When someone thinks about the founding fathers of the USA, they have held a lot of ideas that seem barbaric to us, but they are judged by the moral zeitgeist of their time. There shouldn't be an exception done about anti-semitism in this matter.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
kind of hard to lug to the LAN party tho
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
They have finally perfected the abacus!
FTFA:
"His idea is to stand billions of ultrafine wire loops around the edge of a silicon chip -- hence the name racetrack -- and use electric current to slide infinitesimally small magnets up and down along each of the wires to be read and written as digital ones and zeros.
His research group is able to slide the tiny magnets along notched nanowires at speeds greater than 100 meters a second. Since the tiny magnetic domains have to travel only submolecular distances, it is possible to read and write magnetic regions with different polarization as quickly as a single nanosecond -- far faster than existing storage technologies."
What is really really old is new again, eh?
I can see it now - to erase your iPod, turn it on its side and shake - just like an Etch-a-Sketch!
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
The whole article was tagged as "vaporware", that's what he was responding to. Please read the page before you go throwing around insults.
"Life's short and hard, like a body building elf." -- The Bloodhound Gang
"make a 'disk drive on a chip' possible"
Isolinear chips here we come!
Singling him out does take in account the attitude of the times. Anti-antisemitism was much more common then, but even in those days The International Jew was a step beyond. They earned him the title of the only American mentioned in Mien Kampf.
As I was reading it, it sounded very much like Bubble Memory of the 80s. Magnetic domains were created on a solid-state substrate and run around little tracks on the chip by using little T-shaped control circuits (sort of like his little racetrack coils). Bubble memory was one of those things that finally became practical about the time that it became obsolete. Since the bubbles could only be written/read semi-serially, it was pretty slow.
On the plus side, it was non-volatile and very sturdy. I can't remember, but I believe that it was pretty radiation hard, also.
Anon
New Scientist covered this a lifetime ago.
If I were to place bets, I would be expecting the next innovative storage technology to be coming from a guy like him, and not some dark horse who stumbled onto something in his spare time.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Soooo, what do you think about THAT?
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
This is the man who pioneered exploiting the giant magnetoresistance effect in the 90s, causing disk storage to jump ahead of the Moore's Law curve.
I didn't realize that the amount of data stored on a disk was related to the number of transistors on an integrated circuit. This sentence doesn't even make sense if you misinterpret Moore's law the way it's usually misinterpreted...doubling of speed of CPUs.
Moore's Law
Kind thoughts do not change the world
I have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition which this 50TB hard drive is too small to contain.
This is probably the most insightful comment I've seen in a long time - yeah its funny, but most comedy truly is insightful.
Damn, I wish I were smart enough to invent my own effects in the realm of physics... It sure woulda made physics classes a lot more fun and easy!
So true. I'm one of the people in the small community of physics.... and he didn't invent GMR. First publication was in 88 by Baibich. Not to discount the contributions that Parkin has made, but he was not the inventor nor would making the claim that he is the single most important person in the field be correct...
to email me: take my
So if you're saying bad things about jews that are true is that antisemitic?
For example, if you're saying that jews are fuckers because they believe they are God's chosen people and everyone else will burn in hell, is that antisemitic?
intelligent design :-)
Not evolution...
>For example, if you're saying that jews are fuckers because they believe they are God's chosen people and everyone else will burn in hell, is that antisemitic?
Well, it's inaccurate... but hey, that's never stopped people from making ludicrous claims.
By 2012 I expect to have, this super memory technology, solar cells with efficiency above 70% for pennies per watt, flying cars, paper thin televisions the size of my wall, fuel cell powered hybrid cars, batteries replaced by power cells that store more power, cost less, are infinitely rechargeable, and charge/discharge like capacitors -- plus several other things from the last few months of Slashdot.
I like your future better than mine, where I am running from grey goo, hiding from flesh-eating robots, all of my software is delivered by Google, and I have to pee into my fuel cells. On the plus side, my $100 laptop will be pretty sweet.
What makes this, and some other potential memory technologies, so interesting is that it would have the mass storage and non volatility of harddrives, the solid state of flash, and the speed of DRAM, or even exceeding that of current techs.
This is interesting not because its "more, better, faster" but because it can completely change the way computers work. Imagine simply not needing all the storage tiers we currently have... disks, harddrive, flash, DRAM, cache... imagine something big enough and fast enough to cover it all. A CPU and this memory, and nothing else. It could mean big changes to your operating system. Imagine just not needing to load and save things anymore. Imagine not needing elaborate schemes like virtual memory paging, harddrive caching, file systems, or even needing to compress things as often. There's all kinds of overhead and mechanisms in our OS's that are currently needed to deal with all the different storage hardware and their limitations.
If this memory can work fast enough, it could even change the way CPU's are designed. It could change almost everything.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
No, comedy is funny. If it's insightful, smart people will think about it after the show. Also, insightful comedians are called humorists.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
It would have been nice if the summary had explained what the hell "GMR" is or why anybody should care. I presume it's this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistive_effect except that the patent for that is held by Peter Grünberg and Albert Fert, so I really have no clue if that's what they're talking about or not. Seems applicable to hard drives, at least.
Comment of the year
It may surprise you to know that the "burn in hell" mythology isn't a Jewish idea. That was a christian innovation.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Albert Einstein for one.
But being that we've sat through more than enough "believe it when I see it situations" we'll just have to wait and see..
Also, when will people stop referring to "Moore's Law" as a law? It's a hypothesis at best.
What was Prus supposed to have said that was anti-semitic?
Not correct. The whole hell of fire concept also known as Ghenna is of Jewish Origin. See The article on this in the Jewish Encyclopedia.
In five years, you will have:
16 cores
10GB Ram
300 GB HVDs, burnable
5-10 TB disks
Aforementioned disks will be 90% full or pron
Carpal tunnel syndrome
Be happy with that.
Stuart S. P. Parkin is a foreigner stealing American jobs.
See his biography here: http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/bio.parkin.html
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
You know, I always thought Godwin's Law was a little tongue-in-cheek until today.
> You know, I always thought Godwin's Law was a little tongue-in-cheek until today.
Godwin's law is usually applied to conversations that turn to Hitler that should have no relation to Hitler.
In this case Henry Ford's anti-semetic writings and remarks happened at the same time in history as WWII. Hitler certainly knew about Ford and his writings, and Ford claimed to know all about the 'hidden masterminds' behind starting the war.
I'd say it is appropriate to bring up Hitler in this discussion of Henry Ford, and in no way invokes Godwin's law.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Insightful?! More like pathologically unable to understand sarcasm, I mean how bleeding obvious does it have to be?
Wikipedia:
"Godwin's Law (also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies)[1] is an adage formulated by Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states:[2] As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. Godwin's law is often cited in online discussions as a caution against the use of inflammatory rhetoric or exaggerated comparisons. The rule does not make any statement as to whether any particular reference or comparison to Hitler or the Nazis might be appropriate, but only asserts that one arising is increasingly probable. It is precisely because such a comparison or reference may sometimes be appropriate, Godwin has argued,[3] that overuse of Nazi and Hitler comparisons should be avoided, because it robs the valid comparisons of their impact."
Lighten up man.
Credit should be given for past accomplishments. After all, this may be even better than It/Ginger/Segway/A-#@$$#^@-Self-Balancing-Scooter.
I stand corrected. How disappointing. I had thought that Jewish mythology was a tad more, shall we say, benign than that of their neighbors.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
ah yes, but will it run with Linux?
Weve got five years, stuck on my eyes
Five years, what a surprise
Weve got five years, my brain hurts a lot
Five years, thats all weve got
In addition I thought we were talking about new tech. Not Henry Ford being an anti semite. In any thread the comment immediately preceding Godwins law being invoked is most likely going to have something to do with it. But Hitler and the Nazis is a long way away from the new storage technoledgy that was being discussed.
All well and true, except that the discussion was about hard drives and now it is about Nazis so there we go with how Godwin's eventually works.
Obviously it's stupid to dismiss this guy as a crackpot.
However, I think people have a reasonable point in that even the most promising technologies only have a small chance of making it to market. There are just so many different possible ways that we might choose to improve on current storage requirements that any particular option is low likelihood. This is how Moore's law and the like continue to work even while individual projects have failures or bumps.
This having been said I don't see the motivation for the hate on this as being vaporware. It's just another possible way we might develop disk drives in the future being pursued by a clever researcher. *I* happen to find this interesting even though it will likely not be the way we do storage in the future.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Albert Einstein for one.
... he was out in left field.
Shockley for another. Outside of his field
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Look at the title bar of your browser. See how it says "Inventor of GMR Bids To Shake Up Storage, Again" . . . yeah.
What the hell is a zeitgeist? Does repeating it make you smarter?
We need to establish some kind of rubric for evaluating the efficacy of nomenclature repetition in craniophallic compensation.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
All of the "Abrahamic religions" are rip-offs of other religions anyway: heaven, hell, gods, monotheism, etc., they were all invented before.
Craniophallic, is that like fucked in the head??
This is the sig that says NI (again)
I was looking at the Wikipedia article and noticed his name wasn't there, but did not know enough about the issue to start messing about. Perhaps a blurb about him could be added that he helped commercialize the discovery by Peter Grunberg and Albert Fert in the GMR article.
10 terabytes of ram? You must be able to fire ceramics with the heat that puppy puts out!
What happens when that coiled wire breaks? Is the break a broken circuit or just a bad bit? Is the entire 16TB screwed because one tiny notch in the beginning of the wire got poked by a paperclip? Dr. Parkins has a nice idea, but I wouldn't trust such a massive amount of data so tenuously stored.
Yeah, and that was written over 30 years ago.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
I can't see any amount of monkeys trying to solder billions of bits of short wire onto the edge of a silicon chip happening at all. Just too fiddly!
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
> You are a humorless pedant.
Bite me.
> You are also wrong.
> "The rule does not make any statement as to whether any particular reference or comparison to Hitler or the Nazis might be appropriate"
Well played, sir.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I posted my prediction in a China IT discussion forum. If you want proof, I can show you. I can't pinpoint the exact technology, I only give the big picture, that the next generation harddisk will be so fast that it can act as DRAM as well as being physical storage. I posted my next generation hard disk prediction around the time news of Nintendo WII comes out, at that time Nintendo WII isn't officially named WII yet. The news article just mention a revolution in gaming hardware from Nintendo. Dear top 100 technology companies, I need a good job. If you think I am a good techologist to have make such predictions before time and want to hire me, please contact me.
...will need to get serious about their 64-bit Windows drivers. That much memory won't work on a 32-bit OS. ;-)
;-)
Actually, it sounds like the kernel developers will need to get started on code to make RAM and disk space interchangeable. For instance, you may not need extra memory to load executables or shared libraries if you could just point to where they're stored on the "hard drive". Although issues like self-modifying code and "running out of disk space" seem much more ominous from that perspective.
Here's an article on the topic: http://rationalrevolution.net/articles/darwin_nazism.htm
Interesting bit from the article, Abraham Lincoln was a racist. He just thought that, while negros were inferior to whites, they weren't so inferior that they could be treated like property. A quote by Lincoln from a debate at the time:
That might better support your point of judging people according to the age they lived in.Is that stories like these will no longer seem absurd:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/28/1912247
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/14/180222
and you will indeed be prohibited from erasing data from your computer:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/21/023235
Scary thought, through one man's genius, the courts may fully achieve their stupidity.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
"A visit to Mr. Parkin's crowded office reveals him to be a 51-year-old British-American scientist for whom the term hyperactive is a modest understatement at best. During interviews he is constantly in motion. When he speaks publicly at scientific gatherings, his longtime technology assistant, Kevin Roche, is careful to see that Mr. Parkin empties the change from his pockets, lest he distract his audience with the constant jingling of coins and keys."
This is so true. In June I was down in Cali for the SpinAPS conference and, well, Parkin is like some crazy methed-up autistic genius. Emphasis on the genius, though.
Racetrack memory looks really fantastic. I love this diagram (I think Kevin made it?):
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/spinaps/research/sd/racetrack_anim.gif
The major problem that they're facing is domain wall drift and annihilation. They have to keep the bits a certain length in the channel, as they will randomly shorten and disappear. You could start out with a pattern 101, and if the '0' bit shortens too much (domain walls get too close together), the domain walls will be attracted to each other and cancel out, leaving a bit pattern of 111.
I think one strategy I saw for getting around this was introducing deliberate imperfections in the racetrack. These imperfections can 'trap' domain walls in place so that they will click into certain positions. When the current is applied, the domain walls shift over and click in again. Of course, now the problem is getting them to all start shifting at the same time, every time.
This is massively complicated, and if successful it will be a feat of precision nanoengineering.
"Invent" is probably the wrong term here. It is probably more appropriate to say that we didn't discover the GMR effect - that work was done by other physicists. However, as the article mentions, he was the one who took the basic scientific discovery and brought into the commercial market place - he made a new and practical use of the effect. This is akin to quantum computing - where the basic effects underlying a quantum computer have likely been well known for many years, but no one has overcome the practical hurdles needed for evryday use of such technology...
Could be, I guess. Since I just made it up right there as a placeholder for a term describing the equivalent inches of perceived IQ points.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Here's a quote from Wikipedia in an article about a long forgotten technology:
"Bobeck's team soon had 1 cm square memories that stored 4,096 bits, the same as a then-standard plane of core memory. This sparked considerable interest in the industry. Not only could bubble memories replace core, but it seemed that they could replace tapes and disks as well."
The way both technologies work is similar too. It's just now being done on a much much smaller scale and it scales up to another dimension.
The trouble with your Jimmy scenario is this:
Although your thumb drive can pack 5 TB, it doesn't have write rates much better than about 10 x today's 1-10 MB/s, let's call it 100 MB/sec, OK?
This means that each GB 10 seconds, and a TB require 10K seconds or nearly 3 hours, if everything is working perfectly.
For 5TB we're talking 13-15 hours, which means that you must have spent the entire day over at Jimmy's house.
All this is assuming both Jimmy's (solid state?) disk array and your thumb drive can actually sustain a Gbit/s for a file copy operation, including all the file system overhead.
Over the last 25 years both IO rates and storage densities have increased exponentially, but the storage exponent has been significantly larger than the IO exponent, which means that the time to totally fill/empty a new, state-of-the art
drive has increased every year.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
IBM of late has made a move into spintronic atomic storage with IBM's Parkins new approach, referred to as "racetrack memory". Its interesting to note that pancake motors, electric field generators, etc. all use the concept of creating strong EMF fields by subatomic particles moving through serial wires. Not only will there be increased EMF, heat and energy needs of the device but when the wire develops an open in any wire there goes the memory device. High stray EMF magnetic fields could also pose a health problem to users as well as other electronics in the circuit. How does IBM propose handling the EMF crosstalk between wires possibly effecting neighboring wires data ? These and many other question need to be answered before this technology can be said to be reliable holding a customers data.
http://colossalstorage.net/spintronics.htm