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Researchers Achieve Amazing Memory Density
Mr. Fahrenheit writes in with a Wired story on research out of Arizona State, where researchers have "developed a low-cost, low-power computer memory that could put terabyte-sized thumb drives in consumers' pockets within a few years... The new memory technology — programmable metallization cell (PMC) — comes as current storage technologies are starting to reach their physical limits." PMC involves the on-demand creation of copper nano-wire bridges. It's said to promise memories that are 1/10 the cost and 1/1000 the power consumption of conventional Flash memory. Three memory manufacturers have licensed the technology and the first chips are expected on the market in 18 months.
How about speed, durability, mean time before failure, etc.
Not to mention the price per gig will be ridiculous. Why not just get a MyBook or something similar and say to hell with all of this vapor nonsense.
The game.
Are you kidding me? putting 1.44 Mb on a 3 & 1/2 inch disk still blows my mind. If there is a nuclear holocaust, and I'm the smartest person left alive, I'd consider myself a genius if I could get to that stage. Or I suppose, as the smartest person alive, I could just invent a clay tablet and They'd worship me as a god. yeah, that seems easier. But still, man 1.44 mb! un-freaking-believable.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The problem with how memory is that it gives developers no incentive to optimize code to run it faster/better/smaller other then small speed boosts. 1 TB of storage would be nice, but if it means that I have to download 300 GB for a program or a Linux distribution with the same speed of 1 MB/second it would take forever or say a 7 MB web site. We need to see an increase in Internet speeds at affordable prices first before we go overboard with physical storage.
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Now building copper bridges is a whole different kind of animal. It's more akin to chemistry. Reliability is likely to be poor, as impurities and dust bollix things up. Speed and power consumption are not going to be great, as you're moving copper atoms, many thousands of times heavier than electrons.
This device may be more in the running as a disk-drive replacement than as a substitute for flash memory.
On the other hand, having cheap storage on this scale also means that one of the largest barriers to HD-DVD/BluRay piracy will suddenly vaporize--everyone can have more than enough storage for all those pirated movies. Of course, the bandwidth to download them will still remain the bottleneck...
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It reminds me of an episode from Futurama: ..."
Fry: "That clover helped by rat fink brother steal my dream of going into space! Now I'll never get there
Leela: "You went there this morning for donuts."
I mean, take for example flight. It's one helluva achievement isn't it, to fly like a bird. Ever since the dawn of man we've dreamt of it, like the legend of Icarus, Leonardo da Vinci's attempts at a flying machine and so on until finally some daredevils like the Wright brothers actually did it. I should be thrilled to fly, right? Well, last time I was just annoyed at the security checks, bored by the safety lecture, disgusted by the food and spent most of my time reading a book waiting for time to pass.
Or this little magic thingie I have that lets me speak to anyone in the whole world, through thin air (not all the way, but I'll skip the details). I mean, would you believe it? Instead I'm mostly annoyed on how it can't always get through walls, that I have to recharge it every so often and that it's part of the "always on" stress of modern life.
For that matter, that I can post this comment on a website halfway around the globe is a wonder of technology itself. That doesn't stop me (or everyone else, it seems) from complaining about their ISP and prices, support etc. or some shortcoming of the applications or protocols or whatever.
I think the point is that if you went around like "oh wow" appriciating common things that much, you'd never do anything but get dazzled all day long. Then again, it probably wouldn't hurt to enjoy what we have a little more, but still... and "how much 1.44 MB is" is rather far down on my list.
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I remember when I first got a 1200 baud modem and was ecstatically excited to have a piece of communications technology that could actually send text faster than I could read it. It was like science fiction!
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I recall the 5MB hard drive in an early generation IBM PC. Took something like four hours to run a format cycle, which even then seemed outrageous compared to 360KB floppy disk write speeds. Hated that machine. By the time you installed a compiler or two, no room left to do any work. On the 10MB machine, you could compile a program, *and* generate some listings to help debug the compiler (errors in the compilers of that era were almost as frequent as errors in my own code). One I recall from a C compiler: initialize a global variable with a pointer to another global variable? Not today, apparently.
For some reason, for all these years since, the storage curve has remained largely constant, with the exception of the jump forward when IBM release pixie dust and PRML technology at about the same time. The rule of thumb is that by the time the kinks are worked out of a new approach, the cost or performance is no different that what was on the curve already, and the technology either finds a specialized niche, or dies completely.
Bubble memory, anyone?
This sounds suspiciously like "whiskers".
These little puppies were first discovered by accident back when AT&T was "The Phone Company". If I've got this right: Bell Labs had come up with a new alloy for terminal blocks that they thought would have some advantages. Western Electric made some up and the Bell Systems deployed them.
Some time later they started running into trouble. Linemen would try to turn the nut and it wouldn't turn. So they cut some out and sent 'em in for analysis.
These long, thin, crystals of metal had grown through the boundary of the thread, welding the nuts onto the bolts. They were extremely pure and very strong - in the general neighborhood of the theoretical strength of the material, when things fabricated by normal processes fell short by a "factor of many" (more than one power of ten).
They cristened them "whiskers". I'm not aware of anything that came of that at the time.
But when the early satellites were going up (back when the very early printed circuits were the cutting edge of hi-tech), whiskers showed up again - growing between the lines of the printed circuit board exposed to vacuum and zero g, shorting things out. This is why early US satellites (heavily miniaturized to go on the small boosters) tended to flake out while early Russian stuff (big discrete components on terminal strips lifted by their big boosters) kept working - and why that reversed later, when the US had the problem solved and the Russians started miniaturizing and had to go through the same learning curve.
Once they figured out what was happening and came up with an alloy that didn't whisker, they played around for a bit with self-healing printed circuit boards. These had conductors of a whiskering alloy with a plating of non-whiskering stuff. Idea was that if a trace broke due to vibration during launch, the exposed core would whisker across the gap and make things run again (until it whiskered over to another wire and shorted things out.) During that time they also played with self-healing aluminized mylar capacitors, designed so that if the mylar developed a hole the cap would discharge through the hole, vaporize the aluminum around the hole, and things would then go back to normal operation.
I'm not sure that any of this actually worked out.
If these ARE whiskers-on-demand as storage elements, it's nice to see whiskers actually do something useful. B-)
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Remember young one, there was once a time, in ages long past, that hard disks and flash were wild dreams, even perhaps vaporware.
These took ages too develop to maturity as well, and many techs that once were introduced just fizzled away.
Too often we make the mistake of thinking things should be happening now. IT moves fast, but not all that fast. How long does it take for MS to come up with a new version of their software? Let alone actually do the things they once promised?
Hardware is the same, we see something intresting and want it now. Doesn't work like that, and then when it finally arrives, we are so used to it already that we just go "meh".
We got harddrives of HALF A TERRABYTE being the most effective money/gigabyte buy right now. Think about that for a second. How many years do you have to go back when you would have had to stuff a server full of hardware to get that kind of storage you can now find in basic desktops?
How many years ago is it that people were excited about flash storage of 32 megabytes that was slow as hell?
All these advances are possible because of those stories like these you read about, and then forgot when the actuall technology arrives that uses them.
Offcourse we get a lot of vapor, hologram storage seems to be one, but a lot of the stuff does eventually, slowly emerge. Take e-paper. Been around for years, but there are now actuall products out there that use it. By the time it will become widely available it won't be worthy of a headline anymore, and slashdot will be reporting on the next hot thing that might one day be.
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