Researchers Achieve Amazing Memory Density 279
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.
Other specs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Vaporware. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Vaporware. (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with this memory.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The problem with this memory.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Sorry to be a spoil-sport, but (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Good news for pirates (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Other specs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus InPhase only sells the 300GB version now. Your claim to be able to call up and get the 1.6TB discs must have been made 3 to 4 years in the future since that is when their website says they will make the 3rd generation disks that are 1.6TB.
Plus one of those drives costs $18,000! (and the 300GB disks costs $180). I could build a RAID and replace hard drives every few years and still come out ahead price-wise.
Re:Vaporware. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Other specs? (Score:3, Interesting)
And you might want to check your credit balance before you whip out your credit card for one: "At US$18,000 for a holographic disk drive, InPhase has priced its product roughly mid-point between a $30,000 enterprise-class tape drive and midrange tape drives such as LTO tape drives, which go for around $4,000. The holographic platters will retail for $180 each." Of course, this is the amount they are charging for the 300GB version that was supposed to start shipping back in July. But you should be able to get this today -- if not "today."
Re:Vaporware. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Other specs? (Score:5, Interesting)
But that doesn't mean I have high hopes;
Re:Well, youngin, many of us remember... (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Sounds like "whiskers". (Score:5, Interesting)
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-)
How soon we forget, those were wild dreams once to (Score:5, Interesting)
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.