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IBM Claims Spintronics Memory Breakthrough
CWmike writes with this excerpt from ComputerWorld: "In a paper set to be published this week in the scientific journal Nature, IBM researchers are claiming a huge breakthrough in spintronics, a technology that could significantly boost capacity and lower power use of memory and storage devices. Spintronics, short for 'spin transport electronics,' uses the natural spin of electrons within a magnetic field in combination with a read/write head to lay down and read back bits of data on semiconductor material. By changing an electron's axis in an up or down orientation — all relative to the space in which it exists — physicists are able to have it represent bits of data. For example, an electron on an upward axis is a one; and an electron on a downward axis is a zero. Spintronics has long faced an intrinsic problem because electrons have only held an 'up or down' orientation for 100 picoseconds. A picosecond is one trillionth of a second [one thousandth of a nanosecond.] One hundred picoseconds is not enough time for a compute cycle, so transistors cannot complete a compute function and data storage is not persistent. In the study published in Nature, IBM Research and the Solid State Physics Laboratory at ETH Zurich announced they had found a way to synchronize electrons, which could extend their spin lifetime by 30 times to 1.1 nanoseconds, the time it takes for a 1 GHz processor to cycle."
Was it really necessary to explain the SI unit 'pico' on Slashdot...?
No sig today...
Was it really necessary to explain the SI unit 'pico' on Slashdot...?
Yes because little Johnny's parents always told him he was a winner and that he is special. If he was expected to know something but didn't then that might hurt his precious little feelings. We can't have that! It might lead to him reading a book or two and well this is America! Clearly you see the problem.
That's some really, really dynamic RAM. Don't skip a refresh cycle.
Likely not, or not like they claim. Stories like this remind me of Maxwell's Demon. It seems to violate the rules, allows for unlimited energy! Except until you realize that the demon can't be run for free. They claim the breakthrough in stability of the spin states and neglect the cost in space and energy in everything else around it.
Stop this sensationalism! Give me some science on it and tell me some more details. How do they generate electrons with a single spin? How about a blurb about spintronics already being used in modern hard drive read heads? Cut the nonsense and tittilating lies about promises of the future and tell us the details.
Geez
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
... how long before this technology becomes available?
(I mean real time, in standard years, not in researchers' years)
Nobody Seems To Notice and Nobody Seems To Care - Government & Stealth Malware
In Response To Slashdot Article: Former Pentagon Analyst: China Has Backdoors To 80% of Telecoms 87
How many rootkits does the US[2] use officially or unofficially?
How much of the free but proprietary software in the US spies on you?
Which software would that be?
Visit any of the top freeware sites in the US, count the number of thousands or millions of downloads of free but proprietary software, much of it works, again on a proprietary Operating System, with files stored or in transit.
How many free but proprietary programs have you downloaded and scanned entire hard drives, flash drives, and other media? Do you realize you are giving these types of proprietary programs complete access to all of your computer's files on the basis of faith alone?
If you are an atheist, the comparison is that you believe in code you cannot see to detect and contain malware on the basis of faith! So you do believe in something invisible to you, don't you?
I'm now going to touch on a subject most anti-malware, commercial or free, developers will DELETE on most of their forums or mailing lists:
APT malware infecting and remaining in BIOS, on PCI and AGP devices, in firmware, your router (many routers are forced to place backdoors in their firmware for their government) your NIC, and many other devices.
Where are the commercial or free anti-malware organizations and individual's products which hash and compare in the cloud and scan for malware for these vectors? If you post on mailing lists or forums of most anti-malware organizations about this threat, one of the following actions will apply: your post will be deleted and/or moved to a hard to find or 'deleted/junk posts' forum section, someone or a team of individuals will mock you in various forms 'tin foil hat', 'conspiracy nut', and my favorite, 'where is the proof of these infections?' One only needs to search Google for these threats and they will open your malware world view to a much larger arena of malware on devices not scanned/supported by the scanners from these freeware sites. This point assumed you're using the proprietary Microsoft Windows OS. Now, let's move on to Linux.
The rootkit scanners for Linux are few and poor. If you're lucky, you'll know how to use chkrootkit (but you can use strings and other tools for analysis) and show the strings of binaries on your installation, but the results are dependent on your capability of deciphering the output and performing further analysis with various tools or in an environment such as Remnux Linux. None of these free scanners scan the earlier mentioned areas of your PC, either! Nor do they detect many of the hundreds of trojans and rootkits easily available on popular websites and the dark/deep web.
Compromised defenders of Linux will look down their nose at you (unless they are into reverse engineering malware/bad binaries, Google for this and Linux and begin a valuable education!) and respond with a similar tone, if they don't call you a noob or point to verifying/downloading packages in a signed repo/original/secure source or checking hashes, they will jump to conspiracy type labels, ignore you, lock and/or shuffle the thread, or otherwise lead you astray from learning how to examine bad binaries. The world of Linux is funny in this way, and I've been a part of it for many years. The majority of Linux users, like the Windows users, will go out of their way to lead you and say anything other than pointing you to information readily available on detailed binary file analysis.
Don't let them get you down, the information is plenty and out there, some from some well known publishers of Linux/Unix books. Search, learn, and share the information on detecting and picking through bad binaries. But this still will not touch the void of the APT malware described above which will survive any wipe of r/w media. I'm convinced, on both *nix and Windows, these pieces of APT malware
Spintronics...uses the natural spin of electrons within a magnetic field in combination with a read/write head to lay down and read back bits of data on semiconductor material.
I'm wondering if this will fail the same way HDDs do when the head falls? Whenever I see something about read/write heads, I get flashblacks to all the clicks-of-death I've heard over the years, and it always makes me wince a little.
I'll admit it, I don't entirely understand what they're talking about here, but it seems a little scant on details such as whether or not this uses readily available (cheap) materials or uses some rare elements that are possibly put to better use elsewhere. I'm sure many will disagree with me and point out cases where I'm wrong, but I'm personally not all that concerned about having more storage, I've got more than I know what to do with at the moment. What I would rather see is some technology that is more easily recyclable.
if so fuck 'em! doing advanced research and then expecting to get paid for it is just fucking bullshit! if samsung and google can't steal it then it ain't fair! FUCK IBM!
If they're relying on the simple rotation of a very tiny particle, couldn't I then significantly erase parts of my SSD by simply shaking it? In other words, erase it like an etch a sketch? :-P I mean how hard I can shake it compared to the mass and energy of a tiny spinning particle, it could start spinning a different way, right? That and ionizing radiation in any tiny dose would blow apart all your data. Get read for an SSD and RAM sticks cased in lead.
So I wonder what kinds of numbers we're talking about now as far as memory capacity and power usage goes.
A breakthrough is when it leads to a useful item to be produced. Call me back when the spins can be held for an order of magnitude 9 or 10 (second or minute).
I think a better name would be Super Mega Ultra Golem RAM. (in other words, SMUGRAM) ... that was terrible. I couldn't think of a word for G so I just put Golem.
I'm going to go cry in the stationary cupboard now. I'm sorry.
What's the heat dissipation of this technology? If it is low enough, maybe lifetime extension is not needed. Just run it at 30GHz. Probably some naive wishing on my part.
"Queue" and "cue" are completely different words with different meanings. Use a fucking dictionary before you try to use words that are foreign to you.
Since when does 100 picoseconds * 30 = 1.1 nanoseconds?
Pentium
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Between a Ghz refresh cycle and the need for -233 Celsius temperatures...this won't save any power in a desktop context even if the memory cells themselves use zero watts.
I'll suppose if you get down to -233, the rest of your computer can start superconducting, and you can get the extra 3 Ghz of raw CPU speed you need to play Call of Duty LXVII at full res.
If you turn it upside down, is all the data inverted?
See subject.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.