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posted by martyb on Saturday May 18 2019, @12:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the Putin-it-all-down-the-memory-hole dept.

From Eureka Alert

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and their colleagues from Germany and the Netherlands have achieved material magnetization switching on the shortest timescales, at a minimal energy cost. They have thus developed a prototype of energy-efficient data storage devices. The paper was published in the journal Nature.

The rapid development of information technology calls for data storage devices controlled by quantum mechanisms without energy losses. Maintaining data centers consumes over 3% of the power generated worldwide, and this figure is growing. While writing and reading information is a bottleneck for IT development, the fundamental laws of nature actually do not prohibit the existence of fast and energy-efficient data storage.

The most reliable way of storing data is to encode it as binary zeros and ones, which correspond to the orientations of the microscopic magnets, known as spins, in magnetic materials. This is how a computer hard drive stores information. To switch a bit between its two basic states, it is remagnetized via a magnetic field pulse. However, this operation requires much time and energy.

[...] "The idea was to use the previously discovered spin switching mechanism as an instrument for efficiently driving spins out of equilibrium and studying the fundamental limitations on the speed and energy cost of writing information. Our research focused on the so-called fingerprints of the mechanism with the maximum possible speed and minimum energy dissipation," commented study co-author Professor Alexey Kimel of Radboud University Nijmegen and MIREA.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1174-7 Temporal and spectral fingerprints of ultrafast all-coherent spin switching (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1174-7)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 18 2019, @12:53AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 18 2019, @12:53AM (#844895)

    That means what? In space? In energy? Currently, the speed is the key, because they can't keep up with multiple processing cores, so all that bs with "cache" memory. And this is nothing new since the 90s.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday May 18 2019, @02:49AM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday May 18 2019, @02:49AM (#844909) Journal

      It doesn't necessarily have to be faster or more energy efficient than normal memory (although it sounds like it could be both). If it can mostly match memory but also be used as dense, non-volatile storage, then you have universal memory which would be very valuable.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Saturday May 18 2019, @07:52PM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday May 18 2019, @07:52PM (#845119) Journal

      Even if the memory itself were instantaneous, you cannot make the connection to the CPU arbitrarily fast. Therefore I don't think you'll get rid of cache (unless you locate the main memory right on the processor chip).

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Saturday May 18 2019, @02:06PM (2 children)

    by Rich (945) on Saturday May 18 2019, @02:06PM (#845012) Journal

    The Nature article reads like LaForge explains how to break out of a Q confinement in secondary literature of early ST:TNG :)

    They could've put it a bit easier. As I understood that's basically putting a new spin (pun intended) on core memory. They have this super exotic crystal (Out of my head, I would've thought Thulium is a non-natural actinide...), they apply a little (microns) bowtie shaped receptor to it and hit the crystal with a femtosecond laser. Dependent on a field applied through the receptor, the spin of the crystal in that area changes state. Very much like classic core memory, just that it can be read non-destructively.

    Understanding that the little receptacles can be scaled up is easy, but I wonder how they want to get the femtosecond laser into a chip. But then, boffins who come up with such an experiment probably can also design in a suitable solid state laser onto a chip.

    • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday May 18 2019, @04:08PM (1 child)

      by bzipitidoo (4388) on Saturday May 18 2019, @04:08PM (#845042) Journal

      > They could've put it a bit easier.

      That's one of the criticisms of current research publication. Got to wow the peer reviewers with dense and difficult math, logic, and even the cheap trick of using big $10 words. If the authors do a great job of clearly describing their results in as easy and simple language as possible, the reviewers might be swayed into thinking that the result is trivial, and reject the paper.

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