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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."
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?
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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.
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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 $4 million to fill up.
Extra capacity is useless if the cost of data is artificially inflated
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Does this technology take forever to filter down or are we being taken on a ride of fantasy yet again?
The CD-ROM came out in the eighties. Yet it wasn't until the very late 90s that CD burners and blank media were widely available to consumers - at which point video DVDs were common, though it wasn't until the early 00s that DVD-Rs popped up on the market. While they became faster and more afforable much faster than CDs, they're still ultimately an evolution of the same technology and form factor. Anything significantly different is going to take longer to trickle down - flash memory has been around for just as long, but is just now hitting the price-to-capacity point where it's become consumer-friendly for a variety of devices.
I had a 4x SCSI CD burner in 1998 and thought paying a couple of hundred for the burner and a buck a blank was AWESOME. Now I have 16x double-layer DVD burners in all of my home machines (total cost : much less than that crotchety old 4x burner), and am paying less than a buck a blank for more than seven times the storage capacity.
Blu-Ray burners are currently retailing for 500$ and up; HD-DVD for 600$ and up, and the media is between 10$ and 25$ per disk. At those price points, I'd say we're still having issues getting to BR/HD-DVD, let alone beyond it. In five years these burners will be under 100$ and the media will be under 5$; at which point the technology in the article will hopefully be hitting the wild at a price point similar to where Blu Ray and HD-DVD are now - prohibitively expensive for consumers, but available for those who actually need it.
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.
Even evolution happens in jumps, not gradually.
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!
Yeah. Because there certainly has not been a leap from hard drives the size of a washing machine, to drives the size of a toaster, to drives of modern form factor. And there definitely has not been a progression from 1 megabyte to 20 megabyte to 200 megabyte to 1 gigabyte to 20 gigabyte to 150 gigabytes... No siree, it's all a big lie.
Everyone knows that hard drives are vaporware. And the idea of computer performance increasing exponentially? I mean who the hell would believe that shit.
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?
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
>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.
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.
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