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Inventor of GMR Bids To Shake Up Storage, Again
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Sep 11, 2007 04:21 PM
from the dark-horse-in-search-of-a-racetrack dept.
from the dark-horse-in-search-of-a-racetrack dept.
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."
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Finally... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Finally... (Score:5, Funny)
Anybody bought a hard drive in the last 10 years? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Anybody bought a hard drive in the last 10 year (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Anybody bought a hard drive in the last 10 year (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, right.
Re:Anybody bought a hard drive in the last 10 year (Score:4, Informative)
Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
Library conversion (Score:5, Funny)
3rd dimension and cooling (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:3rd dimension and cooling (Score:4, Informative)
The genius of the design is that the bits can be moved along the nanowires, allowing tens to hundreds of bits or maybe more to be accessed by only one reader. The readers can be fabricated in an array on a chip, and the wires can be hung from above, storing the data vertically. AFAIK they haven't yet gotten to the point of figuring out fabrication issues for the nanowire parts, like making a vertically oriented array and aligning them to readers. So far they have been working on getting the racetrack part working. That is, they have been working on using an electric current to shift magnetic domains longitudinally along a nanowire, and reading/writing the domains. And actually, the article seems to suggest that they are ignoring the 3-dimensional nanowire fabrication issues for now, and are going to make prototypes with the wires fabricated traditionally, 2-dimensionally, on a chip surface, which may still be competitive with Flash.
As for heat issues, Hopefully the amount of current necessary will be small and thus the wires themselves will generate little heat. I would imagine that this design would have fewer transistors than, say, a DRAM, since the transistors will not be storing the data themselves. The transistors remain 2-dimensional, only on the chip surface. The wires are the only 3-dimensional part.
Whats the point... (Score:5, Insightful)
If every 4mb of music you buy have costs $2 [slashdot.org], then your 16 Terrabyte Ipod would cost $4 million to fill up.
Extra capacity is useless if the cost of data is artificially inflated
Re:Whats the point... (Score:4, Insightful)
As storage grows, so does the bit rate and fidelity of file formats, and the way we use storage itself. I don't know about you, but back in 1994, I had maybe 20 meg of low-bitrate WAV files on my 250 megabyte harddrive. 10 years later, I had 20 gigabytes of MP3 files on my 250 gigabyte harddrive. In another 10 years, I fully expect to have 20 terrabytes of audio/video on my 250 terrabyte drive.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Thus again proving (Score:3, Insightful)
Five Years. It's always Five Years. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Storage leaps (Score:5, Interesting)
"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."
"Inventor" of GMR a little misleading (Score:4, Informative)
Now here comes the MPAA and RIAA (Score:4, Funny)
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.
At Long Last! (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Fermat Jr.'s Last Theorem (Score:5, Funny)
Whats really interesting.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Three to five years is OK... (Score:4, Insightful)
Update of electronic devices typically takes quite a while. NAND flash was invented in the 1980s yet only really caught on in approx 2002.
Re:Oh, no! Not the dreaded (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I have that in my laptop. Unfortunately I only have a 2 gig harddrive but I do have 56k on my video card.