
Racetrack Memory -- 100,000 Times Faster Than Today's -- May Arrive in 5-7 Years - estherschindler
http://www.itworld.com/hardware/127654/racetrack-memory-computer-memory-thats-100000-times-faster-than-todays-may-arrive-5-
======
ajays
"100,000 times faster than today's" ... hard drives. Not RAM. Or Flash.

Plus, I'm very skeptical of claims that contain weasel-words like "may" and
"could" and "possibly".

~~~
estherschindler
It's like beta software. Until it ships, the best anyone can say is "It may."
When it ships, then they can say, "It does."

------
vietor
Did it strike anyone else as intellectually dishonest (or really sloppy?) that
that entire article seemed to come from a parallel reality where SSDs don't
exist?

I get that this would be an improvement over current SSDs. But to not even
mention them while at the same time saying thigns like:

"In a first step, one could envisage attacking the Flash market and replacing
the USB sticks with something much faster..."

"One could imagine the technology being useful for both small mobile devices
(such as smartphones) and large systems (such as servers)."

Yes! If only there were some sort of non-volatile, low power, shock resistant,
storage technology which were orders of magnitude faster than rotating hard
disks! We could call it some sort of Solid State Drive, and it would totally
change the storage market!

------
drallison
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racetrack_memory> is worth a read.

------
jallmann
The article did not make this clear, but this is non-volatile memory
(according to Wikipedia). Anyone know this compares to memristors? Or is that
apples and oranges?

~~~
ScottBurson
It's certainly in the same general category of nanotechnology-enabled non-
volatile solid-state memory technologies. Off the cuff, I would guess
(emphasizing _guess_ ) that memristors will have better access times while
racetrack looks like it might be denser. But the big question is
manufacturability. There's already a pilot project to produce memristor
memory. Racetrack, even if it's superior in the abstract (and I'm not sure it
is), might just be too late to the party. It's not even completely clear that
memristors will edge out flash, which after all has massive momentum at this
point, but I think the odds are good -- memristors are (or can be) much
faster.

------
jasongullickson
You have to wonder about someone working on "memory of the future" who makes
analogies like this:

 _" "It’s like reading an entire VHS cassette in less than a second."_

I don't know about the rest of you but I think we're close to done using
magnets to store data...

~~~
jerf
This used the word "spin" prominently, which leads me to believe that it is
using spintronics: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spintronics> , which may
involve the word "magnetic" but is not actually based on magnets in the way
you meant it.

~~~
jasongullickson
Wow, that was an awesome read; thanks for passing it along!

I was mostly just poking fun at the reference to VHS but you are correct in
your assessment of the "license" I was taking in my reference to magnetism.

------
teamonkey
This reminds me a little of reel-to-reel tape storage. It seems to me that the
throughput could be enormous but the seek time would vary according to how
physically long the race track was, so if you double the capacity you double
the seek time. Or am I getting the wrong end of the stick?

------
devmonk
Related: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1907318>

------
caustic
It seems like they were right about Singularity!

