100,000 year nanowire storage

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
100,000 year nanowire storage

Data writing, erasing and retrieval time of 50 ns - 1,000 times faster than flash - fast enough to replace DRAM in many applications.



10 TB notebook drive



http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=199



http://physorg.com/news109253804.html

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    dentondenton Posts: 725member
    8 -10 year time-frame? Don't get your hopes up. There is a lot of "promising" research that just doesn't pan out. This is likely just another one of those.



    It would be really cool, though...
  • Reply 2 of 8
    All it takes is one breakthrough. Seriously, it's going to be one breakthrough that brings about the next phase of man: a solid-state, discrete component for "energy harvesting" (which incidentally would have many more uses). I've heard about a handful of future memory technologies promising to each be panaceas, and it's likely that one or more of them will make it.



    Consider that the transistor is only 60, and the computer chip only about 30. Ten years after the 4004, there was already a scholarly field in computer architecture. The airplane has a similar story. It just takes one breakthrough.
  • Reply 3 of 8
    dentondenton Posts: 725member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Splinemodel View Post


    All it takes is one breakthrough. Seriously, it's going to be one breakthrough that brings about the next phase of man: a solid-state, discrete component for "energy harvesting" (which incidentally would have many more uses). I've heard about a handful of future memory technologies promising to each be panaceas, and it's likely that one or more of them will make it.



    Consider that the transistor is only 60, and the computer chip only about 30. Ten years after the 4004, there was already a scholarly field in computer architecture. The airplane has a similar story. It just takes one breakthrough.



    Unfortunately, the breakthroughs are never predictable. But we will see some incredible things in the next 10-20 years, some will be expected, others will not; and those may open up entirely new areas of knowledge and research (as the invention of the transistor did for computing science).
  • Reply 4 of 8
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Denton View Post


    Unfortunately, the breakthroughs are never predictable.



    ... More predictable than you think. Nanotech is very much underway, so we're going to see many breakthroughs soon that utilize nanotech and crystalline structures. Consider that the transistor was really just a market manifestation of the fact that quantum physics had progressed past the nascent stage. Nanotech is a manifestation of quantum physics becoming old-hat.
  • Reply 5 of 8
    sequitursequitur Posts: 1,910member
    With nanotechnology, I can foresee a computer the size of a cigarette pack or a deck of cards. That would replace the laptop and desktop. With some new Wi Fi, the desk monitor would handshake with the computer and turn on. With a dongle or USB drive, it would handshake with any other monitor. No need for a monitor while away from the desk or traveling; a pair of special Wi Fi glasses would suffice. Of course, the input would be voice recognition.



    Maybe that's not imaginative enough; how about a small gadget (credit card size) that would connect through a satellite with a computer based in home or office.



    Any more predictions?
  • Reply 6 of 8
    addaboxaddabox Posts: 12,665member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by sequitur View Post


    With nanotechnology, I can foresee a computer the size of a cigarette pack or a deck of cards. That would replace the laptop and desktop. With some new Wi Fi, the desk monitor would handshake with the computer and turn on. With a dongle or USB drive, it would handshake with any other monitor. No need for a monitor while away from the desk or traveling; a pair of special Wi Fi glasses would suffice. Of course, the input would be voice recognition.



    Maybe that's not imaginative enough; how about a small gadget (credit card size) that would connect through a satellite with a computer based in home or office.



    Any more predictions?





    Yes. Whatever new tech is coming, a great deal of its horsepower will be harnessed to provide incredibly invasive, ubiquitous advertising, designed to appear to be talking to "me" directly.



    The same underlying tech that makes that possible-- sophisticated real-time harvesting and demographic parsing of my every electronic transaction coupled with location tracking derived from whatever killer little supercomputer like portable thing I either wear or have had inserted-- will also form the backbone of the new "security" state, that allows instantaneous tracking and profiling of each and every citizen.



    In fact, these two functions-- advertising and surveillance -- will become so entangled as to amount to a single entity, with information on my whereabouts, habits and transactions (along with the AI generated "consumer/citizen profile" that includes a thorough history, predicts my next move and suggests how I might be best coerced) becoming a lightly regulated commodity moving more or less transparently between the outsourced government security server farms and those of the consumer profiling/tracking companies- which turn out to be the same thing.



    A citizen embedded in the watchful advertising matrix has nothing to fear if they are "normal" and buying "normal" things. Terrorists, subversives, and dealers of contraband, however, will be known by their purchases, movements and financial dealings that run afoul of the matching routines in the AI's model.



    Think, Amazon's or Netflix's targeted suggestion functionality, but far more sophisticated, astonishingly ubiquitous, and with the neat little kicker that if your tastes start wandering too far afield, or if you seem to be changing up your habits a little to aggressively, you get flagged by the feds for a closer look.
  • Reply 7 of 8
    dudditsduddits Posts: 260member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by sequitur View Post


    Any more predictions?



    A rock, with all its electrons, contains more potential computational power than all current computers on Earth combined.



    Human progress will be measured by the increasing harvesting of matter and energy - on Earth, in the Solar System, and beyond - for computation.
  • Reply 8 of 8
    sequitursequitur Posts: 1,910member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Duddits View Post


    A rock, with all its electrons, contains more potential computational power than all current computers on Earth combined.



    Human progress will be measured by the increasing harvesting of matter and energy - on Earth, in the Solar System, and beyond - for computation.



    Nice kitty! I've just finished watching the 6 hour Stephen Hawking's 'The Universe" and I'm hyped up on that stuff.

    Where did you find that bit about the "rock"? I'd like to read that.
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