Magnetic Processors - Computing's New Future? 206
metalcoat writes "For the first time researchers have created a working prototype of a radical new chip design based on magnetism instead of electrical transistors. As transistor-based microchips hit the limits of Moore's Law, a group of electrical engineers at the University of Notre Dame has fabricated a chip that uses nanoscale magnetic "islands" to juggle the ones and zeroes of binary code.
Wolfgang Perod and his colleagues turned to the process of magnetic patterning (.pdf) to produce a new chip that uses arrays of separate magnetic domains. Each island maintains its own magnetic field. Because the chip has no wires, its device density and processing power may eventually be much higher than transistor-based devices. And it won't be nearly as power-hungry, which will translate to less heat emission and a cooler future for portable hardware like laptops."
Crinkled (Score:5, Funny)
I thought this had already happened when they moved from straight cut to crinkle cut??
Re:Crinkled (Score:2)
Re:Crinkled (Score:2)
Flipping magnets... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Flipping magnets... (Score:2)
Who modded this insightful? People say there are no stupid questions, but this one is scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Re:Flipping magnets... (Score:3, Funny)
Oops! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Flipping magnets... (Score:2)
I suppose that, just like all toilets swirl the other direction down under, when the poles swap these computers will run backwards... (hmmm, what would all that pr0n look like in reverse?)
;-)
Re:Flipping magnets... (Score:3, Funny)
Russian
Re:Flipping magnets... (Score:2)
Re:Flipping magnets... (Score:2)
Re:Flipping magnets... (Score:3, Informative)
When I first heard this claim, I watched the water drain out of the sink that night when washing dishes. I was a little disturbed when it swirled down the drain clockwise.
Re:Flipping magnets... (Score:3, Funny)
Everybody goes to church and votes Republican?
Re:Flipping magnets... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Flipping magnets... (Score:3, Informative)
They don't. It's a myth. The Coriolis force is too weak to enforce the direction of swirl. It depends on the toilet.
Re:Flipping magnets... (Score:3, Funny)
On an unrelated note, imagine a beowulf cluster of these things -- all stuck together and you can't pry them apart!
Re:Flipping magnets... (Score:2)
Re:Flipping magnets... (Score:2)
This is like a side step more than an upgrade. Though it might handle cosmic radiation better leading to the space shuttle's having something more powerful than 486.(Note they have of upgraded to something a bit faster by now, my data is old).
Re:Flipping magnets... (Score:2)
Re:Flipping magnets... (Score:2)
My thought was perhaps this is no problem at all, or perhaps t
Re:Flipping magnets... (Score:2)
Re:Flipping magnets... (Score:2)
Re:Flipping magnets... (Score:2)
Re:Flipping magnets... (Score:2)
pretty cool--I hope they've patented it! (Score:2)
I hope they've patented it!
Re:pretty cool--I hope they've patented it! (Score:2, Funny)
I bet _somebody_ has...
Re:pretty cool--I hope they've patented it! (Score:4, Insightful)
I bet one of two things happens. Either someone tries to patent it 5 years after being on the market, and perhaps succeeds since by then patent agents will only have 8 seconds to decide if an idea is patentable, or somebody currently has an obscure patent of a vague rough idea that they never produced that sounds slightly similar to this, which doesn't show up on searches, and they'll keep quiet about it until this thing makes billions and then say "Hey, you owe me money!".
Re:pretty cool--I hope they've patented it! (Score:2)
Especially if it turns out these "magnetic" chips have a limited life of 5 years or so, forcing you to keep shelling out money to the chipmakers...then they don't even need to be innovative to continue to receive the periodic upgrade money they have become so used to.
Magnetic monopoles (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see how this could create dense active bulk storage, such as was done long ago with magnetic bubble memory. But I'm skeptical about a pure magnetic logic system beating electronics.
Re:Magnetic monopoles (Score:2)
Re:Magnetic monopoles (Score:2)
"ideal" transistor (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"ideal" transistor (Score:5, Insightful)
Blast from the past. (Score:5, Informative)
A rotating magnetic field transverse to the chip would cause the chevrons to act like little iron bar bagnets pulling the bubble from one side to the other. because the chevron shape is asymetric it acted like a rachet and would only move the bubble unidirectionally. If the field was strong enough the bubble would then "leap" to the next chevron. Under the microscope you saw marching "bits" moving along. so you could move all the bit patterns like a train along the tracks in a bulk matterial with one layer of passive patterning. at one point in the loop track you placed a reader and a writer. this way you had sequential access to any bit and could inject or delete bits in the train.
When the power went off the bubbles stayed put.
It never made it to market (fuji made some) because it's niche was too small. it was slower than ram but faster than a hard drive. it was cheaper than ram but more expensive than a hard drive. At the time it was denser than ram but less dense than a harddrive. Thus it's only use was as a cache between ram and harddrives and in applications where robustness and non-voltility would be valuable like high-radiation sattelites and point of sale terminals. The latter market was eaten by EAROM and then flash memory.
this new material sounds like it uses simmilar concepts but is much smaller and actually performs bubble logic. Not sure about where the clock comes from: perhaps it's still a rotatin mag fiield?
Re:Blast from the past. (Score:2)
It was one of the completely irrelevant things I had to learn to get a degree. Along with how punched cards and paper tapes worked. And databases that wrote directly to sectors on the hard disk.
Re:Blast from the past. (Score:2)
I assume you mean the mass consumer market? I worked as a phone tech at my university. A couple years ago we replaced our finicky NEC phone switch (1980's vintage) with newer system. I'm pretty sure the processor had several cards of bubble memory rather than RAM, I think so calls didn't get dropped if the power blinked. The memory rack probably took up around a cubic foot of space. The new switch uses a pair of redundant compact
Bubble Memory (Score:2)
Re:Bonus points (Score:2)
Knight Rider!
Re:Magnetic monopoles (Score:3, Insightful)
Magnetic bubble memory (Score:2)
Re:Don't get ahead of yourself- Re:Magnetic monopo (Score:2)
Radical new chip design? (Score:4, Informative)
Hmm. Maybe.
But this seems a lot like bubble memory [wikipedia.org] to me.
And while the wiki entry doesn't mention using this for direct computation, it is indeed possible.
Re:Radical new chip design? (Score:2)
And while the wiki entry doesn't mention using this for direct computation, it is indeed possible.*/
Its true that others speculated that bubble memory could be used for computations, but this experiment has produced working gates from this technology. Also, these gates seem to be much smaller (hence faster) than bubble memory structures.
more like Programmable Logic Arrays? (Score:4, Informative)
I interpret this new magnetic technology to be a more compact implementation of programmable logic arrays [wikipedia.org]. PLAs are standard tool in digital circuit design and can theoretically emulate any other digital state machine such as a CPU. Engineers like them because they are like blank circuits you can quickly burn a pattern in them. New high-density PLA chips in the 1980s lead to the rise of the mini-supercomputer industry, with companies like Convex using them. However, general purpose CPUs from Intel and Sun eventually exceeded 1990s PLA speeds and circuit capacities.
Faster than transistors? (Score:3, Insightful)
Moore's "law" (Score:5, Insightful)
The submitter speaks of Moore's law as if it were some actual law governing the physics of silicon based integrated circuits. His "law" was nothing more than an observation regarding the time it took the industry to pack more transistors into a given space. It makes no assertions regarding maximum transistor density, heat dissipation, or any of the other physical limitations chip manufacturers keep overcoming.
Dan East
Re:Moore's "law" (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Moore's "law" (Score:2)
I would also like to point out that the fabs are running into many issue in trying to keep up with moores law, so the smalles gate size probably won't be smaller the about 8 electrons. your loss do to tunneling starts to get unresonable, and gates that can use fewer elsetrons have a tendency to flip unpredictably.
Don't get me wrong, I would lover to see 1000 trillion transister on a cpu, but I ahve my doubts. I also suspect this is why
Re:Moore's "law" (Score:2)
That's also somewhat inaccurate. Since around the mid 80's, the international semiconductor consortium (I don't remember the exact name) set their technology targets to fall on the Moore's Law line. It was sort of their goal from that point on. So, it's really only "surprisingly accurate" up until the 80's; from that point on it's really just "expected."
Re:Moore's "law" (Score:5, Informative)
Specifically they are developing to the International Technological Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), which is produced by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), of which Intel, AMD, IBM, etc are members. This is the little-known [by the public] pre-competitive stage of the semi-conductor industry in which they all get together and collaborate on developing a "best available industrial consensus" on the way that the industry should move forward (choice of semiconductor technologies, etc).
This lecture by Sir Maurice Wilkes http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mvw1/Progress_in_Compute
Re:Moore's "law" (Score:2)
I have heard this before (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I have heard this before (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I have heard this before (Score:2)
Re:I have heard this before (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I have heard this before (Score:2)
Re:I have heard this before (Score:2)
Re:I have heard this before (Score:2)
Forget gravity though. I want a computer based on the strong nuclear force.
Re:I have heard this before (Score:2)
Re:I have heard this before (Score:2)
Re:I have heard this before (Score:2, Funny)
Why I'm skeptical in the short-term (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, it's not clear that this technology isn't subject to same "limits of Moore's law" (if there is such a thing) as silicon chips. The use of electron-beam lithography would seem to mean that this technology is subject to the some of the same feature-size and practicality limits suffered by silicon chips.
Perhaps this technology will find a place somewhere, it just faces a major uphill battle if it is to supplant silicon.
Yeah Right... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yeah Right... (Score:2)
Wait! Stop! (Score:3, Funny)
We're coming back to this now? (Score:4, Insightful)
This supervisor poured much time and effort into his team, investigating various concepts of magnetic computation. Then the integrated circuit came along and turned him into a ruined man.
So have we finally come full-circle now, back to magnetic computation? Call me conservative but I don't think it will fare any better this time around.
Magnetic amplifiers work fine. They're just big. (Score:2)
Magnetic amplifiers have a long and honorable history. They're basically transformers with at least three windings [tpub.com], designed so that the control winding can saturate the magnetic core. This yields gain. Magnetic amplifiers were big and slow, but solidly reliable. Absent major physical damage, they don't fail.
Magnetic amplifiers were used widely in the telephone system for decades. In Western Electric gear, anything wi
What about electronic surveillance? (Score:3, Interesting)
I know "reading" a CPU is a bit more complex (understatement), but given enough time and resources someone will figure it out. We're already broadcasting our keystrokes and network communications, how easy do we need to make it?
the down side (Score:2)
Lastly, any user of the processor in an area frequented by Boy Scouts, may find that their home being referr
Re:the down side (Score:2)
I just want to know... (Score:2)
New scientist article (Score:4, Interesting)
They say that a magnetic insulator would have to be used to shield the chip from external interference.
Added bonus (Score:2)
Let's see the RIAA sue me when I have a useless hard drive, haha!
(Yes, I know that the magnets wouldn't be powerful enough to do anything to the hard drive.)
What the article didnt mention (Score:4, Interesting)
Magnetic circuits have been studied for at least 80 years. The basic problem is one of size and speed. A dipole magnet (onr with N and S poles) has a certain minimum size, otherwise it depolarizes itself. That sets a minimum size for any magnetic device. Also it's hard to make magnetic amplifiers with more than a small fan-out. It's also really hard to distribute a clock signal-- magnetic pulses fall off at a 1/r^3 rate, and generating a fast magnetic pulse gets blocked by the inductance of the coil.
Now there *are* cigarette-pack to Taj Mahal sized magnetic voltage regulators in use. Your PC power supply may be using one to regulate the 3.3 volt output. But getting them down to IC-size is going to be really hard to impossible.
Re:What the article didnt mention (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What the article didnt mention (Score:2)
No, the cat does not "got my tongue." (Score:2, Funny)
Pithy Scientist: Sir, in 20 years, you'll be taxing them.
We have this already, sort of (Score:2)
Woo Hoo!!! (Score:2)
I've always wanted to find out if 1GB of iron-core memory would completely throw the Earth's magentic field out of whack. And even if it didn't, you'd have that really cool clicking sound on a huge scale as the bits were all flipped.
Ahh, to hear 1GB of little metal rings being flipped over in a large sequential write. That would be awesome.
=)
Explanation of core memory (Score:3, Informative)
I have about 128 bits of it sitting in my closet somewhere. It is not based on a power of two like ram is now, but the length X width of the number of magnets on each side.
A close-up picture of it [museumwaalsdorp.nl]
Not the only magnetic chip (Score:2)
I find it interesting that these new technologies for high speed replacements of transistors are both based on magnetic fields.
Limits (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I don't think "Moore's Law" has a limit. An off-the-cuff comment that the number of transistors in a processor will double every 18 months doesn't have a limit. It just keeps getting higher and higher.
Re:Limits (Score:2)
The value of the number of transistors as a function of time doesn't have a limit. However, the accuracy with which Moore's Law continues to correlate with reality does (or may) have a limit.
I think I'll wait for biological computers (Score:2)
Technical crap (Score:2)
Either NAND or NOR gates are eno
Re:Technical crap (Score:3, Interesting)
functions all in one stage. The early TTL won over other logic designs in part because
the basic gate used multiple emitters on the input transistor to get an AND function,
and multiple input transistors to get the OR function. That meant that the delay
and complexity character of AND and OR were the same, and that the complex function
of AND/OR/INVERT was available as a fast multiplexer, with the same characteristics
as a sim
Hmmm, Now where did I put that .... (Score:3, Funny)
Oh my, I'm seeing spots, sun spots...
A new lower power level of EMP weapons has been announced, following the announcement of the first commercial Magnetic computing....
But does it...? (Score:2)
Magnetic Core Memory (Score:2)
Is this 'spintronics' ? (Score:2)
Scientific American article on magnetologic gates (Score:3, Interesting)
Although they're a wonderful technology that in the right hands would permit vast improvements in computation, I'm scared to think what a painful experience it would be to program such a device. We have enough trouble dealing with CPUs that have fixed instruction sets and few enough ASM programmers as it is. Is a person even capable of programming such a device efficiently, or writing software to do the same? I'm pretty sure that just having a 10x10 matrix of them to keep track of would be hard for me - I can't imagine trying to write code to control a whole CPU of them that wouldn't be hopelessly bogged down with getGateStatus()- and setGateStatus()-type functions.
Or would their role be more limited - switching individual gates to be AND/OR/NOT/NAND in hardware, for instance, so you would do setGateFunction(gate_no, wanted_function); LOGIC_OP rather than having a switch? Or perhaps they would be hard enough to program that you would have to use just a handful of pre-written setups for them, optimizing for games or math performance? loadChipSetup(long_math.mag) or loadChipSetup(fast_string_ops.mag)?
Now imagine the next generation of viruses rewiring your CPU to do God-knows-what.
Re:magnetic links? (Score:2)
RTFA -- the submitter just copied and pasted the first four paragraphs of the article in his submission.
Re:So whyd my submission of it get rejected? (Score:3, Insightful)
If "metalcoat", "The Winner", submitted the article ONE MINUTE before you did, then, they would have been placed it in the queue and rejeced ALL similar subsequent submissions. In other words, we shall refer to you as "The Loser". Get used to it. Roland P. submits about 400 articles a day. You are lucky if you beat him to the punch one time in six months.
Re:More uses? (Score:2)
Techie cop: "I scanned his CPU."
Detective: "Any evidence?"
Techie cop: "Well, his last operation was 00110001010001101100100110011001 masked through 11001110101110010011011001100110."
Detective: "And what's that mean?"
Techie cop: "The answer is 00000000000000000000000000000000."
Detective: "Aha! Book him."
Re:More uses? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More uses? (Score:2)
My boss used to design software and hardware for NASA spacecraft, including the shuttle. Apparently, cosmic rays (as well as other forms of radiation) are such a problem for onboard computers that the early systems were designed to reboot themselves every 10 milliseconds. That guarantees that, if the processor gets stuck in a bogus state, it won't stay that way for more than 10 milliseconds before recovery kicks in.
Imagine writing software wit
Re:More uses? (Score:2)
What about Electro Magnetic Pulses? (Score:2)
Re:Scenario (Score:2)
Is your child named Luke, by any chance?
Re:Magnetic field shielding Materials (Score:3, Informative)
opposing magnetic field'; that means the shield materials ARE affected,
and are in fact somewhat magnetized, to create the shielding
effect.
The best shield materials are superconductors (which only exist at low
temperatures). The most common magnetic shield materials are soft
iron alloys (Permalloy and Mu-Metal are brand names). Shielding
from rapidly-changing magnetism is easier, most electrical conductors
will do this (but supercond