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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.
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 agree. Especially on storage. It seems for years I've been hearing where Seagate or IBM or whomever has a new tech that is going to do XX GB per square centimeter and it will be on the market in three to five years... we're still having issues getting beyond blu-ray/hd-dvd. Does this technology take forever to filter down or are we being taken on a ride of fantasy yet again?
And don't get me wrong, I'm not a naysayer. I was for this to happen. I want a PDA sized gadget with all my music and the library on congress on with the battery life of a nuclear submarine but I know that not a whole hell of a lot has changed on the shelves of Best Buy.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
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 $4 million to fill up.
Extra capacity is useless if the cost of data is artificially inflated
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Does this technology take forever to filter down or are we being taken on a ride of fantasy yet again?
The CD-ROM came out in the eighties. Yet it wasn't until the very late 90s that CD burners and blank media were widely available to consumers - at which point video DVDs were common, though it wasn't until the early 00s that DVD-Rs popped up on the market. While they became faster and more afforable much faster than CDs, they're still ultimately an evolution of the same technology and form factor. Anything significantly different is going to take longer to trickle down - flash memory has been around for just as long, but is just now hitting the price-to-capacity point where it's become consumer-friendly for a variety of devices.
I had a 4x SCSI CD burner in 1998 and thought paying a couple of hundred for the burner and a buck a blank was AWESOME. Now I have 16x double-layer DVD burners in all of my home machines (total cost : much less than that crotchety old 4x burner), and am paying less than a buck a blank for more than seven times the storage capacity.
Blu-Ray burners are currently retailing for 500$ 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.
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."
Not sure if this article is dated, but as I (poorly) understand it, Hitachi already developed a DVD that dwarfed HDDVD and BluRay.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zdpcm/is_200508/ai_n14908621
Please tell me if there have been updates.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
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.
not always..
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html
Perpendicualr Recording came out very very very fast after it's concept.. hell i want to say it was less than 3 months between release of idea to owning a drive with that tech.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
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.
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
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.
"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!
Just 20 years ago, a student was lucky to get a 1 Megabyte disk quota on a 200 Megabyte hard drive. Now the flash memory on a digital camera is 10 times that amount.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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
That animation explains why the technology came out so fast. Apparently perpendicular recording is made possible by the application of a technology which has been mature for decades... disco. Very interesting.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
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.
No, that's a hard disk DVR that also burns DVDs. The terabyte is just a hard drive.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
I agree that the article I posted relates to a DVR (should have RTFA a little closer), but I swear that I read that Hitachi had developed a 160GB DVD format. Perhaps I didn't read that FA closer too, but the line item was clear that they thought Blu Ray and HD DVD could be in trouble.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
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
That animation explains why the technology came out so fast. Apparently perpendicular recording is made possible by the application of a technology which has been mature for decades... disco. Very interesting.
So that explains the dancing clean suit men in the Intel commercials...
This guy has a track record. He's already been responsible for a massive jump in disk capacities.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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
The power of boogie, is there anything it can't do?
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."
My father worked for ICL in South Africa when they got an additional 8MB of RAM for their mainframe server. It was the size of a small garage, and he was responsible for debugging it, which at that point still meant climbing inside and flicking cockroaches off the solenoids.
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.
You know, I always thought Godwin's Law was a little tongue-in-cheek until today.
I'll wager with you that it will be less than 3 years, and that the media will be less than $3 a blank.
What is also different now is that people have backup hard drives - in the 90s almost no one had a spare hard drive, perhaps an extra one in the machine. But just a spare hanging around for backups? No. Now, they are in every store.
The humble CD-R,DVD-R has competition - those harddrives and flash drives it did not have 7 years back. And those devices are faster and more competitive in key areas. Especially cost - a 500 GB harddrives cost less than $90 on Pricewatch. That is about 106 4.7GB DVDs in capacity at only twice the cost. Figuring time involved burning - that is less expensive.
I don't even think Blu-ray or HD-DVD is that exciting from a capacity standpoint for back-ups. DVD-Rs are only convenient for me right now when I give data to friends - that's it.
Perhaps HVD will come out soon and that is the only thing I am looking forward to in the area of backing up on optical disks.
Nuclear submarines don't run on batteries.
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?
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
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
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?!
Craniophallic, is that like fucked in the head??
This is the sig that says NI (again)
10 terabytes of ram? You must be able to fire ceramics with the heat that puppy puts out!
Ah, wait, sorry, wrong film, must've had my sections mixed up in the rental store
*blush*
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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.
There hasn't been that much progression in every area, try racing modern disk drives and you'll find they're sorely lacking in that department.And *my* first hard drive was 5 megs (divided in I can't remember how many floppies because that's all the CP/M related OS knew how to handle), so there.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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
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?!
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"
Maybe you meant this.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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