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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?
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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.
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.
Even evolution happens in jumps, not gradually.
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."
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
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?
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
This New Scientist article from centuries ago is slightly clearer.
I have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition which this 50TB hard drive is too small to contain.
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
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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He should be able to move his magnetic domains about once per nanosecond. If you put 128 bits on a ring, that would mean a single ring could clock out 128 bits in as many nanoseconds. There's a bit of write overhead involved in bringing the correct domain underneath the write head, kind of like seek time. Again, for 128 bits per ring, assuming random access, average seek delay would in the neighborhood of 64 nanoseconds.
You would likely rig things so that writes are buffered and sequential addresses take sequential magnetic domains. So write speed would be quite high unless you had out-of-order writes to the same domain, in which case you'd stall an average of 64nS.
You can imagine a pathological write pattern, kind of like trying to alternately write to disk sectors on complete opposite sides of the disk. Even with such a pathological write pattern, you could still do one write every 200nS or so.
Guesstimated throughput would be, assuming 128-bit operations, 1nS rotation time, 128 bits per racetrack, and reasonable buffering and multiplexing:
Random read: 250MB/s
Sequential read: 5GB/s
Random write: 500MB/s
Sequential write: 5GB/s
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.
Craniophallic, is that like fucked in the head??
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