IBM researchers store one bit of magnetic information in just 12 atoms

[labobo]

interesting research, yes but i want the tech in my computer now so what's the holdup ?

To a consumer this research is useless due to the needed low temperature, etc.. so what did you learn that will be useful to a consumer ?

[CassandraVanHout]

Today's bits are the future's floppy disks :o

[roybalcwwu]

Oh crap a virus infected my computer and bricked the OS. Guess I'll need to reformat it.

Formatting... ETA: 57 Years, 28 days, 7 hours, 33 minutes, 55 seconds remaining...

Damn. Shoulda went with a solid state yottabyte drive :-/

[dmhudson91]

@roybalcwwu Hahahaha. Except when things get that big we'll have USB 15.0 which will have 100 TB/s or more operating speeds ;P

[paiwanhan]

so... how would you read from 12 atoms? and how can you scale down that darn tunnelling microscope?

[mindauggas]

I like how they present this a useful, pragmatic, innovation or achievement. Even though its purely symbolic ... it's a show of to possible investors, competitors.

[HWGuyEG]

IBM Model M keyboard, my favourite.

[faisalnahian]

The future is almost here people..

[jasleil]

Came here from SixtySymbols.

[YvesKendo]

Anyone else noticed that at 2:08 the 2nd bit for the letter K should be 1 instead of 0 ? :-)

[Winstonsicle]

Oops, I accidentally breathed on my 16 Yottabyte flash drive, and it got corrupted :(

[Raelsatu]

@Winstonsicle Yottabyte...gonna take a little while to reach that threshold. Of course storage technology has advanced at an exponential rate since its creation, but still. We'll definitely make it there within this generation, eventually we'll be able to store "infinite" data. That+___core systems=simulate other universes, etc. ;}

[Gl1tchProductions]

Back in my day...

[TechXMarine]

This is looking amazing

not just the fact that our computers will shrink, but imagine the millions of servers world wide the size of rooms holding petabytes or exabytes of data converting to something the size of your Desktop Pc.

If this takes off imagine how much the price per GB will go down

50 TB computers for al :D

[xchimino2]

@TechXMarine And Free Education for the entire world. Exciting times coming! :D

[uda911]

This is only viable if

1) the atom they use use is available and cheap

that is the only limiting factor I could think of.

[XTdarkgainTX]

amazing shit

[AgresivePenguinFilms]

How will this affect read/write speeds?

[m4rx05]

@AgresivePenguinFilms This is only speculation, but I think that speeds would increase due to the header not having to spend as much time to search for the data. However, I don't know what this would mean for spin speeds and overall size of HDDs. I think that SSDs will still be better though.

[doghouse144]

But wouldn't a technology this small be extremely prone to magnetic fields? Even a magnet far away would affect it

[1ch190]

@doghouse144 Someone in the room sneezes, windows has encountered an unrecoverable error.

[doghouse144]

@1ch190 It's okay, it will restart and see if the problem has been fixed.

[Dr3amVs]

That means we could have a 3kk TB HDD instead of a 3TB one. LOL

[Schwabbel1111]

Just immagine: Computers as small as human cells. I don't know if this will ever be possible, but maybe in 30 or 40 years we'll be immortal, because all our cells will be replaced by computers. Maybe today it sounds impossible, but what's an IPhone compared to an Computer 40 Years ago? 1000 times smaller and 1000 times more powerful. And this progress happend within 40 years! Just Google "David Kurzweil", it's a very interesting idea.

[machine7elves]

@Schwabbel1111 technology has physical limits, keep dreaming

[bydus88]

IBM is working with atoms does that mean that USA need to bring "democracy" to their headquarters ?

[MustafaGuven]

I wonder can this possible, let's suppose the word "bear" stores in atoms and every letter stores in separate atoms which above mentioned. If I want to change the word "bear" to "fear" so can it find the atom related to "b letter" and replace to "f" only in it? I mean will data run atom based?

[SquareCrystal]

@MustafaGuven

it works like modern technology though use something different when it comes to atoms.

I dunno how modern hard drive works but I assume it's depend on the file format. like NTFS, FAT. and it gives an address to that particular set of atoms. so each one goes as couples. address and the real data. if you want to change b then you just need to call it belonged address to change it. it likes pointers in C plus plus.

[MustafaGuven]

@SquareCrystal actually my question was related to pointers. Will atoms be replaced by this technology with pointers in the future? (I'm so high right now :) ) or do we need to get the idea from the video above that atoms will be used instead of numbers? I hope I explained what I mean clearly :(

[SquareCrystal]

@MustafaGuven

what? pointers is a concept in C and C plus plus it's not even relevant to this

I just used that example to explain it properly. I dunno about this. but it clearly uses 1s and 0s and to store values like modern techs. only different is 12 atoms is used to store a single bit instead 1 million atoms. u still need 1 byte for a ASCII character and 2 bytes for an UNICODE character.

[MustafaGuven]

@SquareCrystal you dont get what I mean, whatever.

[SquareCrystal]

@MustafaGuven

in C plus plus you can assign values to variables then assign that variable's address to another variable which is know as the pointer. so that pointer has the address to that above variable when you want to recollect the value from the variable you can derefer it.the mechanism of dereference is get the memory address from the pointer and the pay a visit to that address in the system memory and retrieve the value stored in the normal variable.

[MustafaGuven]

@SquareCrystal I know buddy I'm software developer. but thanks for remaining :)

[SteveTWalrus]

THINK OF ALL THE PRONz!!!

[mustachos1993]

Dammit those Germans again! :D

[ricardodegilmonde]

holographic porn )

[mikefjones2]

That's per TB.



[mikefjones2]

Wouldn't that be 105,553,116 atoms since there are 12 atoms per bit?

[295728735]

I can see this breaking easily. What about when I have a magnet within a foot of it, which causes a small amount of atoms to go astray? What if some wind bumps into it?

[SteveTWalrus]

@295728735 there bonded on, and sealed in a drive, so wind is not an issue, but you shouldn't get magnets anywhere near any electronics at all....

[295728735]

An atom is not the smallest unit.

[SteveTWalrus]

@295728735 yes but its the smallest that still maintains chemical properties so its the smallest thats useful in this case

[Iaguillo]

DA FUTURE IS HEREEEEEEEEEEEEE

[kalimul]

Kitguru.net brought me here.

[StephenBrownGuitar]

Trouble is with these things is it takes so long to get to the everyday user.

[HeltenDaggert]

I feel even more retarded after watching this

[oldchevy55]

Amazing! Absolutely amazing. Use that intelligence to solve energy and economy problems! It's close to 0 F today. The energy required to heat all the homes, offices, stores, factories will be far more than anything like this will ever save. Implementing a new energy/heating technology would not only be wonderful for the planet, and allow us to save all that fuel for the future, but the manufacturing and installation would create so many new jobs that the economy would be saved as well.

[autte]

he is reading

[abram730]

Sustained read speeds are determined by bit density and rotations speed on hard drives.. If raise that density you don't only raise the amount of information you can store. You also raise the speed you can read it at.

Think an SSD is fast?

[Interessanto]

llol my last Computer has 200 Gigabyte HDD now i have 1000 Gigabyte/1 Terabyte !! But i have never managed to save more than 100 GB!!! and i have 100 Pornos 5000 Musics and 10 Games! What a fuck i need now 1 Petabyte or lots of Exabyte´s ?

[Mediagix]

if that isn't a German accent ;))))

[5h4un360]

I did not understand this video at all lol. Yes I acknowledge I'm an idiot

[TheSimsCreedGuy]

I did some maths. A terabyte hard drive with 12 atoms per bit would approximately equal 4.3 Petabytes. Holy shit.

[riceeatingflip]

Wow. These mad scientists are Mad!

[TheKing4E]

i feel im stupid ...

[SquareCrystal]

great so it says today hard drives need 1 million atoms to store a single bit

which means 1 bit needs 1000000 atoms. so now think if someone has a regular 1 TB hard drive which is equal to 8796093022208 bit if this comes out we can easily store 1 TB data within 8796093 atoms. it's 1 million time smaller than current versions. omg. 

[CrunkSkunk1337]

@SquareCrystal

Fail.

1 TB hard drives are HDD. The first D is for disk. And this is not on a disk. Its more like Flash Memory, which is much smaller. U cant compare them.

[SquareCrystal]

@CrunkSkunk1337

first read it correctly. you look like a noob who just came out from the academic education

[codexelectra]

@SquareCrystal actually I have some doubts about that cause the atoms configuration must be taken in consideration. reading/changing a bit polarisation might not be that simple when things are that small and so much space should be wasted to make it possible but it is a huge gain of space still.

[MrJosiahT]

@SquareCrystal there are many other components that go into a hard drive than just the platter where data is stored, which is likely what they're referring to with their estimate.

[dimbulb23]

Research is good and IBM is tops in R&D. And this may well lead to something practical but imagining actual storage of this density is way out there. Did anyone else notice that to turn these 12 atom bits on and off you'll need a Scanning Tunneling Electron Microscope? $100K+? So your 1TB drive platter will be the size of a pinhead but the read/write head will be the size of refrigerator and you need a super computer to accurately position the probe for each reading or writing of the bits.

[RadaSs90]

I'm looking forward for the computer with this technology, which can download entire internet. :D

[flyingslugasaur]

Everyone should realize that this is no more a "technology" than the second law of thermodynamics, or the conservation of momentum is a technology. All this discovery has shown is that the theoretical limit for the size of a bit is much smaller than what we previously estimated it could be. The researchers themselves estimate at least 10 years before a find like this makes its impact on the market, and THAT'll only occur after engineers figure out a way to use it economically and efficiently.

[alique087]

@everyone here: Will IBM license this new technology to chip makers in the future or will they actually jump into the industry by manufacturing chips of their own using this technological advantage?

[korciz]

미친놈들.

[monnyja]

Future server may smaller than now day.

[Canyoureadmydeadpan]

I think I just got an errection

[m4x2yt]

@AchwaqKhalid I was quoting an article on The Blaze dot com about this technology.

[AchwaqKhalid]

@m4x2yt cool, you can send me the links for related articles in my channel.

[m4x2yt]

@AchwaqKhalid theblaze point com /stories/ibm-creates-worlds-sm­allest-magnetic-storage-device­-from-12-atoms/

[AchwaqKhalid]

So, when can we expect this technology to hit the market? as you know the researchers at intel didn't lost any time and they already ready to deploy their fresh new tri-gate technology.

[m4x2yt]

@AchwaqKhalid "a few problems to be worked out before this technology makes it to commercial hard drives:

1. They operate at 1° K. That’s about -458° F. Bump things up to room temperature and Heinrich thinks it would take about 150 atoms per bit.

2. An even bigger problem. Nobody has a clue how to build something this small outside of the lab. And certainly, nobody can do it cheaply, Heinrich says. “That is something that many people are working on, but nobody has solved it yet.”"

[anonynomnomnom]

@AchwaqKhalid this is a wee more difficult than tri-gates. scanning tunneling microscopes are pretty far away from consumer level prices. plus i imagine they require a great deal of training to even operate.

[48734A]

@AchwaqKhalid Intel developed their tri-gate technology over 5 years ago and planned to use them in their 45nm-CPUs, so it took them some time to get final products. And at the moment this technology IBM developed is expensive and needs very low temperatures to work, so it will take them some more years I think ;)

[Keh0ol]

@AchwaqKhalid and what does trigate have to do with this? it's probably going to be a couple years before this technology is anywhere near ready to hit the market

[Cocodrilo92]

@AchwaqKhalid

Tri-gate isn't groundbreaking. While it is really good, It is just a technology to shrink the transistors, making it more effective.

This research/technology is to move away from transistors.

[AchwaqKhalid]

@Cocodrilo92 i mentioned the 3-gate technology just to focus on the amount of time it takes to deploy new technologies to reach mainstream users and not to focus on it as a breakthrough.

[sausage4mash]

@AchwaqKhalid no time soon , works under very high pressure and super super cold ,maybe could be used in cloud computing

[m4x2yt]

You da man, @Dbugger! Thanks for spotting a bug in my bug report ;-)

[m4x2yt]

Heh, a little bug the geeks may enjoy: same ASCII codes for I and N at 2:03 - 2:07 :-)

The video authors got it right on the atom models earlier (1:47 - 1:53).

[Dbugger]

@m4x2yt you mean the "I" and the "K" :)

[SlapSlapYY2]

Of course he's a german. Winning.

[D4rQW4v3]

brains, they are

[MrArvinAlba]

That was admittedly beyond cool.

[shinimog]

im ready for my implants

[Nuby29]

So if I'm understanding this correctly, the STM can program a bit to 1 or 0. In other words, the bit cell is a bit ROM. Or can this type of technology be used in flash?

[theDrakes]

@Nuby29 well, it is not rom, because it is not read only, but it is not nearly there to use it in a handy device. (and I don't think it is very fast yet)

[IncredibleCocoPants]

awesome! just think of how far we would all be if we didn't blow trillions on useless, silly wars!

could have funded IBM's research projects for at least 500 years with just the two dumbass wars we have going now!

[gmlxdm09]

iNail on the way...

[BlackwaterEl1te]

4k porn?

[etramway]

Brilliant