IBM Creates Working "Racetrack Memory" 99
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."
Sounds like... (Score:5, Interesting)
Correct me if I'm wrong, (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:Turing Machine! (Score:5, Interesting)
Lego Difference Engine [woz.org]
For primary storage (Score:3, Interesting)
Could be interesting.
Compared to PMC? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:this won't take off soon (Score:1, Interesting)
Ten years ago we weren't using PCI Express, and AGP was extremely new.. we were mostly using PCI graphics cards! 3D support wasn't even common at the time. We were surfing the information superhighway at 33.6kbps, 20GB was considered a lot, and black and white laptops were still reasonably common!
Re:Bubble memory (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Turing Machine! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Bubble memory (Score:3, Interesting)