Posted on 03/09/2017 7:21:20 AM PST by Ciaphas Cain
In the never-ending quest to improve computing technology, IBM has just taken a big step smaller: It's found a way to store data on a single atom.
A hard drive today takes about 100,000 atoms to store a single bit of data -- a 1 or 0. The IBM Research results announced Wednesday show how much more densely it might someday be possible to cram information.
How much more densely? Today, you can fit your personal music library into a storage device the size of a penny. With IBM's technique, you could fit Apple's entire music catalog of 26 million songs onto the same area, Big Blue said.
Atomic-level storage could radically change our computing devices. A smartwatch or ring could carry all your personal data, or businesses could keep potentially useful information that today they can't currently afford to preserve. And socking away lots of information is important for artificial intelligence, which has a voracious appetite for data used to train machine-learning systems to do their jobs.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnet.com ...
As Zathras would say: “You are finite. Zathras is finite. This... is wrong tool.”
That's just for the security patches.
Sure would reduce some latency issues with cloud computing!
“There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” was a lecture given by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Feynman considered the possibility of direct manipulation of individual atoms as a more powerful form of synthetic chemistry than those used at the time. The talk went unnoticed and did not inspire the conceptual beginnings of the field. In the 1990s it was rediscovered and publicized as a seminal event in the field, probably to boost the history of nanotechnology with Feynman’s reputation.
It has... Robin Williams movie: “The Final Cut”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Cut_(2004_film)
Just read the whole plot. It sounds pretty interesting. My thoughts are that it would become totally recallable by the person with this ability. Kind of like a photographic memory of EVERYTHING you’ve ever experienced.
There isn't "much data" being stored on one atom, there is one bit. For each additional bit stored, another atom is required. What is changed/controlled is the spin of the atomic nucleus, which can be "flipped" by an rf pulse.
Right, when they say data on an atom what they are saying is that they can detect a toggle. Which means they can store a 1 or a 0 on an atom.
keyboard spew alert
****Kind of like a photographic memory of EVERYTHING you’ve ever experienced.****
With enhanced data collection as well.
Read that many years ago in high school. Thanks for refreshing it :-)
My first CADD system (b4 that I drew on paper w/ pencils) was a VAX 11-730, later a VAX 11-780 (it may have been a 785 which was a slightly better model). The 780 was the size of a large side-by-side refrigerator and required a cold room and 220 volt power.
Internally, it had an 80mb operating drive and a 160mb storage drive. External were two 300mb disk drives, each the size of a dishwasher, also requiring 220 power & cooling.
Internal was also a “pizza oven” magnetic tape drive. It was called pizza oven b/c a front door opened downward and you inserted the 9-track mag tape reel (about 12” dia) as you would a pizza pie. Each mag tape held approx. 50mb of data. Every Friday I did weekly backups. Also did the dailies and we stored the monthly backups off-site.
Things were way different back then lol
And there is the fallacy in reporting that you can store 1 bit in 1 atom. The overhead needed to address each individual atom among quintillions, apply the pulse while not affecting other atoms, and later read it out likely requires at least tens of thousands of atoms for each data-storage atom. So while this is cute, it is subject to the law of diminishing returns once you try to make it into a product.
I do remember that. I used a Vax 11 in college. In fact we had a 5 computer cluster. And your right, the tape drives were huge. But I went home and my father had bought the first IBM XT. So somewhere in the 70’s it went from a refrigerator size to a Kleenex box size.
Life is full of imponderables.
They are already having to deal with quantum tunneling. We're reaching the limits of what is possible to fab using non-quantum effects. Already clockspeeds and die sizes have bumped up against the speed of light. i.e., the chip is running so fast that the clock signal that keeps everything in sync can propagate no faster than the cosmic speed limit, so it would take too long to reach the other side of the chip for the clock to stay in sync. It's amazing when you think about it. Once you bump up against certain limits, they'll have no option but to figure out a way to build the chips in 3 dimensions. (I think they are already doing this to some extent)
From a performance standpoint, how much do you really need? My desktop is about 7 years old now, yet from a performance standpoint I can't really justify upgrading that much. Yeah, I can get more cores, but 95% of the time, most of what I have is just being wasted. I've run up against few processes that can really max my box out, but they are few and far between. So, while I wouldn't mind building out a new box, I can't really justify it from a sheer performance standpoint. I've upgraded the hard drive and video card a while back, but I figure I'll give it another 3 years, then I'll put together a top of the line box again, and will expect it to last about 10 years as well. I'm sure I'll see a performance gain, but it won't be anything like when I was moving from one generation to the next back in the day.
“Meh, until they can encode data at the electron level.”
Perhaps electron spin flip. Link below
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v432/n7013/abs/nature03008.html
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