What is Digg?68 Comments
- PunkHop, on 10/11/2007, -7/+125Um......
***** yeah?
Hey, scientists, once you guys perfect this process and we all have super fast exabyte hard drives, could you guys get working on batteries? kthx. - richbradshaw, on 10/11/2007, -3/+84I have a funny feeling that scientists aren't some resource that can just work on anything... These guys are harddrive guys, the battery guys are battery guys - you can't just stop working on your thing and work on a different thing...
In short:
Hard drive guys 1
Battery Guys 0 - jonathantneal, on 10/11/2007, -1/+69Yea, all these major breakthroughs, and yet most of them still require double-A's.
- FortyCaliber, on 10/11/2007, -2/+56Seriously, though... I'd like some new batteries.
- richbradshaw, on 10/11/2007, -2/+47Moore's 2nd Law says that the longer digg goes on, the more people incorrectly use Moore's Law.
- SomaSynth, on 10/11/2007, -1/+34"it's specifically relevant to semiconducter speeds."
Actually, it's specifically relevant to transistor density, whether it's a semiconductor or not, and regardless of it's speed. - ToadLeg, on 10/11/2007, -2/+31@richbradshaw
yea punkhop has spent too much time playing Civililization style games where you select an upgrade and your scientists research it for you ;) - newl, on 10/11/2007, -3/+29Racetrack eh? Who's going to clean up when things crash?
Joking aside, I think that it will be quite some time before something like this makes it to the masses. - modeless, on 10/11/2007, -0/+24Hmm, so I guess you don't have any Flash memory, or a 1 TB hard drive, or a 16ms response time high resolution full color LCD display, or a CPU with 45nm transistors built on SOI technology, or 200 MBps wireless Ethernet, or a cell phone so small people from 10 years ago wouldn't even recognize it with a battery that lasts for days. All of these things are everyday items now and required breakthroughs just as big as this one to realize. Wake up and look around you: we live in tech nirvana; breakthroughs like this affect us every single day.
- modeless, on 10/11/2007, -0/+18The x-ray microscope is only being used while they prototype different materials for the nanowires. Once they can make good nanowires, they will work on making arrays of them and sticking them on arrays of readers built into a silicon chip.
Better links:
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/spinaps/research/sd/?racetrack
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199000220 - osbjmg, on 10/11/2007, -0/+17Yea, these aren't engineers - these are scientists. That means there will definitely be some time before we even know if it works - let alone profitable enough to manufacture widely.
- vsujohn2, on 10/11/2007, -2/+17Gotta love them Germans...
- toppgun, on 10/11/2007, -0/+13must.....resist.....Godwin.....
HITLER! - bananaguyc, on 10/11/2007, -5/+16The technology to make disposable batteries obsolete has existed for years.
The reason we don't see this technology reaching consumers, is the fact that you have a multi-billion dollar disposable battery industry that will not lie down and allow its business to be obliterated by rapid technological advancement.
On the other hand, I am happy at the prospect of seeing a diskless computer sometime in my lifetime that can hold multiple zettabytes of data. - ChayD, on 10/11/2007, -0/+8Wasn't someone working on something slightly similar in the 70s called 'bubble memory'?
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_memory - Wacer, on 10/11/2007, -2/+9Your too vague. What do you mean by indestructible?
- modeless, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7All sorts of RAM are built of many units which run in parallel. The problem is that you have billions of memory units, but few CPUs. There are only so many wires running from the memory to the CPU(s), so only so much data be sent to/from the CPU(s) at one time. The limit is the wires, not the memory itself. This memory won't solve that problem. Instead, it could possibly be far larger than your RAM and far faster than your hard drive at the same time, replacing both. You would never have to wait for anything to be loaded from your hard drive, and you would never run out of RAM. Major parts of modern operating systems would become obsolete.
- GawtMilk, on 10/11/2007, -1/+8You guys remember POD bots for Counter-Strike? How they'd have those little scripted conversations? That's what some Digg discussions remind me of. Mindless filth.
- merreborn, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7He probably meant indestructible as in "Doesn't have several large platters spinning at hundreds of miles per hour, with an extremely delicate read mechanism floating nanometers above them on tiny cushions of air". Of course, flash drives, which are already on the market, are likely already as Indestructible as a drive built from "racetrack memory" would be. If not more, as they don't include any "nano-" components.
- Hepburn82, on 10/11/2007, -1/+8Nice article - with a clear explanation of the technology.
- merreborn, on 10/11/2007, -1/+8OP is right though. 90% of them don't ever see the light of day. Holographic storage, the guy who claimed you could store 25 gb on a sheet of paper, the various "invisibility cloaks"... And of course that guy that's been working on flying cars for the last 15 years...
- noisebleed, on 10/11/2007, -1/+8Excellent.. I like where this could go. It's amazing to see how far we've come since punch cards, yet still using the same basic concept.
- dwhitbeck, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7Anyone remember bubble memory?
- maninalift, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5The information is stored magnetically, it is stored in the form of magnetic polarisation. Making reasonably cheap very accurate but special purpose magnetic readers is not a problem if there is the potential of a mass market. This is an experimental setup, the special purpose hardware doesn't exist so they have to improvise and use lab equipment.
- vs292, on 10/11/2007, -3/+8StrangeWill:
Pics or it didn't happen.
Actually, I'll just take your word for it. - mitrovarr, on 10/11/2007, -1/+6Drop the conspiracy theories. The cell phone and laptop markets are enormous, probably bigger than the battery industry, and if there was some magical energy-storage technology that dramatically beat batteries they'd be all over it. There isn't... although nickel-metal hydride is making an extremely good attempt at making conventional alkaline cells obsolete lately.
Supercapacitors and fuel cells might take over someday, but they aren't there yet. - maninalift, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5A major advantage of this sort of memory would be that the memory would probably naturally be built of many units which might imply many readers which could run in parallel, drastically increasing the speed of some memory operations.
- logicnazi, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3And even the popularization article was quite clear that without RADICAL advances in either the process tech (perfect wires) or the method it won't work for harddrives
- logicnazi, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3No, it's a storage device (or at least has a small possibility of becoming one in the distant future). Think of it as a tape drive where you push the information passed a fixed sensor. Or alternatively think of it as a tube filled with marbles where white marbles denote 1 and black marbles denote 0. If you had a sensor at one location you could read data out of this storage device by pushing more marbles onto the end so the data you were interested in moved past the sensor. Of course you have to do something to make sure they don't fall off the end but you could just pick them up and put them in the start again.
The reason it is a storage device not a data transfer system is that the data only moves forward when you hit it with a pulse otherwise it stays put. - Darksaber11, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2***** yeah. This is the kind of tech advancement I like to hear about.
- funkspiel, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Who killed better batteries?
- tilleyrw, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Q: "Perfect" crystals/alloys?
A: Zero-G manufacturing in orbiting factories. - oogee, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2I see exactly 3 Guido's read my comment and dugg me down. See what I mean about these guys?
- Jumangi, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Yeah, doing something in the lab is one thing. Making it work work commercially by the millions like current HD tech is another. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't.
- Armor1901, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2If the Germans thought it up, it was probably on accident as they were more likely trying to discover new ways/places/toys to have/use sex
- daleeburg, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2the article never really says what type of space increase we are looking at, does anybody know?
- aonaran, on 04/11/2008, -0/+1Um, you guys are still using disposable batteries?
Let me introduce you to the "rechargeable" battery.
Once upon a time, back in the 1980's there were NiCad (Nickel Cadmium) batteries. You put them into a machine that plugged into the wall outlet called a "charger". At first these machines were big and expensive because people wanted one machine that could charge all types of common battery sizes from AAA to D and even the boxy 9V battery with both terminals on the same end. (these days only really used in smoke detectors)
Over time people noticed that they were only really using AA and AAA anymore so smaller, cheaper "chargers" came on the market.
Then in the 90's the switch to NiMH (Nickel Metal Hydride) began. These batteries that looked and worked very much like the NiCad cousins, did not suffer from the "memory effect" where you had to completely drain your rechargeable batteries or they would gradually lose their ability to charge.
As time went on NiMH batteries have become faster to charge, and higher capacity, and can deliver more power in a short burst than even the old fashioned disposable alkaline or newer disposable lithium batteries that plague the Earth's environment.
These days it makes little sense to use disposable batteries (especiallly as the price of disposables from reliable companies creeps ever closer to the price of a good set of NiMHs. Personally I haven't used disposable batteries at all in years except in applications where the circuit design is so incredibly simple that to the battery it appears to be a short circuit, thus causing the battery to over heat (my "poverty wizard" camera flash triggers that I bought from Hong Kong on eBay) everything else that doesn't have a built in Lithium Ion battery has NiMH. - celerate, on 10/11/2007, -4/+5I've heard of at least one battery company that has big oil investing in it, it was mentioned in the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car". I'm just guessing, but given that better batteries would also be good for use in electric cars and would make significant improvements over existing batteries, they are holding back this technology to keep their own business model alive. After all, doesn't it make sense to screw the consumers and ultimately the entire planet just so you can be half way to a trillion dollars when the planet can't sustain life any more. Global warming FTW!
- logicnazi, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Probably not a space increase at all, or much of one. Heck, by going from a 2d surface to a 1d wire it is probably a space decrease. The material is roughly the same so the size of the domains is probably within an order of magnitude. This is about increasing access speed.
Now perhaps one could couple this with something else to increase space. Who knows it's just a cool experiment it likely will never be in a computer and if it is it won't be for a long time. - boaman, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1When do physicists move up to the international team of physicists? Is that like "going pro" in sports?
- merreborn, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1At the speeds they're talking about here, this technology is a ways off from replacing ram. ram latency is measured in nanoseconds. They've been testing this process with millisecond pulses.
- GawtMilk, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Usually when they have scientists from different nations, or when they aren't from your country. It's more like "going international" in sports.
- logicnazi, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1More precisely the data could be stored in the pattern of magnetic domains on the wire, similar but not quite the same as it is on a disk drive. Just that on it's own would just be a ***** disk drive but if you combine it with a way to move the data past a reader voila.
- ScottMaximus1, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1They're the dream team
- HappyScrappy, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1Sounds more like a delay line to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory
Specifically not the mercury type.
That is, this stores date by taking advantage of the fact that there is finite amount of time it takes for a signal to propagate down a wire. By putting in signals rapidly, multiple signals will be inside the wire at any given time. Do it fast enough and you can store a noticeable amount of data in there.
Still, even if the pulses are a nanosecond long, you won't be able to store many in the wire.
Or am I misunderstanding this? The term "racetrack" memory would imply the data is moving along the wire. - logicnazi, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1@modeless
But this is a (possibly) a HD replacement as it works off magnetic domains that will keep their properties without updating or power for long times. HD's do not have very much parralelism since you can only fit one arm per disk drive without having collisions be a very big problem. In fact usually the arms for the different platters don't even move independently (not that it really matters). - nlspropulsion, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0IBM of late has made a move into spintronic atomic storage with IBM's Parkins new approach, referred to as "racetrack memory". Its interesting to note that pancake motors, electric field generators, etc. all use the concept of creating strong EMF fields by subatomic particles moving through serial wires. Not only will there be increased EMF, heat and energy needs of the device but when the wire develops an open in any wire there goes the memorey device. High stray EMF magnetic fields could also pose a health problem to users as well as other electronics in the circuit. How does IBM propose handling the EMF crosstalk between wires possibly effecting neighboring wires data ? These and many other question need to be answered before this technology can be said to be reliable holding a customers data.
http://colossalstorage.net/spintronics.htm - jazstaR, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0very cool but when im i going to get my crystal technology!!!
(stargate etc etc) - jawagas, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1I complain about batteries to every new person I meet. A car battery should be the size of a laptop battery, and laptop batteries shouldn't suck.
- binaryspiral, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1The modern laptop battery is a marvel in engineering. It's own processor, thermal sensors, memory and custom OS that allows the laptop to interface and interrogate it for information. It also controls how much juice it gives and gets to maximize it's lifespan.
If you all are complaining about battery life span - maybe part of the blame could be that we have P4 2Ghz CPU's, GPU's that put most desktops to shame, a high voltage CC lamp for bright backlighting, six different kinds of wireless connectivity (Bluetooth, EVDO WAN, 802.11 a/b/g/n), high speed powered USB ports, firewire, oh and don't forget those devices that spin on electric motors like your hard drive and optical drive.
Oh, and nobody uses the built in power saving settings because they cause a slightly slower computing experience.
Now, increasing the power density of batteries would be nice - but really, I get four hours out of my laptop because I use my power saving features. My coworkers that don't - 1.5 hours. -
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