Thanks to IBM scientists—who says Intel does all the heavy lifting these days?—we may soon have portable devices that can hold more than 100 times more data than they currently do. The comparison that’s been thrown around is, imagine an iPod with a 500,000 song capacity. (The iPod classic holds 40,000 songs.) Nirvana, I agree. IBM’s calling the new type of memory “racetrack,” which works, in so far as it can be plained to non-physicists, by using the spin of an atom. Oh.
What’s even better about racetrack is that, while, like Flash, it has no moving parts, it can write and re-write without flaking out, unlike Flash, which can only withstand but so many re-writes before failing.
In other words, racetrack will change the way you listen to Donna Summer on the subway.
via Drudge Report
They’ve been talking about this since the early 90s - using the quantum states of atoms so that each atom can actually hold two bits of data simultaneously.
Which means unlimited data storage and never having to delete a file again, except for security reasons.
I’m still waiting for my flying car and lesbian ninja sexbots promised by CARS (Crazy Apple Rumor Site - no on hiatus).
Sounds great, but when will we use spinning atoms to do actual computations? :D
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