Slashdot Mirror
IBM Creates Working "Racetrack Memory"
holy_calamity writes "IBM has created the first working 'racetrack memory' device — a technology we've discussed as it's been touted as the future of memory. It works by writing bits using the magnetic domains inside a very thin wire. Those domain can be shunted along this 'racetrack' and past read heads."
... bubble memory. Welcome to 1968.
I can't be the first one to read this and think, eh, isn't this just bubble memory?
threadeds blog
If you had an infinite-length track, you could theoretically encode data which could itself be interpreted as processor instructions. Then, given these instructions, you could move back and forth within this track and read data and further instructions. With a fairly minimum number of instructions, it would be possible to synthesize more complex instruction batches.
This sounds like such a great idea. I wish I had it already!
Bit 1 - Did something?
Bit 2 - ??????
Bit 3 - Profited?
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
Without a proper Light -Distance analogy I have no way of being impressed by the speed of device. Is it knuckle to knee? Nose to toe? People need to know these things!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
Oh! New motherboards would have to be introduced! That could take some time to switch to indeed, because it's quite rare that such a thing happens.
Except for the switch from DRAM to SDRAM. And the switch from SDRAM to DDR, and from DDR to DDR2, and from DDR2 to DDR3, and from AGP to PCI-e, and from IDE to SATA, and.. and.. ad infinitum.
c++;
but hasn't this been done in the past with electrical pulses sent down a very long wire? In a loop? So long ago that registers were called accumulators?
I remember my OpSys prof showing us one of these things that was new and shiny when HE was in school. Basically just a long (couple km, I think) wire wrapped up in a small coil the size of a shoebox that acted as RAM by sending pulses around the loop, reading them and then sending them again... the delay of electrons traveling the loop acted as extra space, until you were sending pulses continuously. Sort of like a circular stack.
Anyone else see some similarities here?
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
Meh.
Wake me when they come up with "Hot Dog" or "Crashdown" memory.
JJ
Lego Turing Machine
:D
Lego Difference Engine
which is totally what she said
The interesting thing is that they feel it is capable of being primary storage...so we're talking Terabytes...
Could be interesting.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Does anyone have any idea how this compares to programmable metallization cell technology which made the news recently? How close to production is PMC vs racetrack memory?
"War makes me sad." - Me
Well, as a practical matter you probably wouldn't make linear memory with a single read head that was billions of bits long. Nor would you be likely to treat it as such in your programs, although you might have clever adjustments to your algorithms that take its overall performance characteristics into account, the way that people take the performance characteristics of hard disks as a kind of unspoken assumption.
For that matter, modern random access memory is really more of an abstraction than a reality. Programmers usually don't worry about things like memory pages except in a kind of statistical way. The address you want may be in cache, or it may be in DRAM or it may be in the paging file.
Most programmers have been living with an abstraction for a very long time, which is that there are two kinds of memory: fast, volatile random access memory and slow, persistent "external" memory. This seems like it is a fundamental difference, but it is really quite arbitrary. You could treat a robotic tape library as a massive, but slow random access persistent memory, if that suited your purposes. Different aspects of flash memory straddle different parts of the divide between working memory and persistent storage.
I'd say the single thing most likely to really change over the next twenty years is this neat two way division of memory, especially as mobile and embedded devices become more common.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
on the racetrack memory results. "Come on, NAND gate#7. Lucky #7! Daddy needs a new iPod"
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.