IBM smashes Moore's Law

[decrypted]

Did anyone else catch this breakthrough? Saw it on ComputerWorld.com. Basically "IBM announced Thursday that after five years of work, its researchers have been able to reduce from about one million to 12 the number of atoms required to create a bit of data."

Entire article is here: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9223396/IBM_smashes_Moore_s_Law_cuts_bit_size_to_12_atoms

Pretty neat idea. Just won't be seen for 10 more years probably.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

What does this have to do with Moore's Law?

EDIT: In any case:

The experiment was performed at low temperature: about 1 degree Kelvin, which corresponds to about -272 °C (-458 °F). The byte starts switching randomly about once a minute due to thermal energy (heat) at about 5 degrees Kelvin.
"We use low temperatures because it enables us to start from one atom and assemble bigger and bigger structures while keeping an eye on their magnetic properties. The more atoms we use to make each bit, the more stable the bits become. We anticipate that in order to make bits of this type that are stable at room temperature would require about 150 atoms per bit (rather than 12 atoms at low temperatures)," an IBM spokesman said.

 

[Xtrem]

1 million to 150 atoms? That's amazing

 

[decrypted]

Yes it probably is a far stretch to Moore's Law at best. And I'm as skeptical as you with the temperatures and other special conditions. However, at least there is something new to work towards.

 

[Ben90]

Many people get the actual meaning of Moore's law confused. Graph for easy explanation:

There are already transistors that hit 100GHz. Not exactly production viable though.

 

[wuliheron]

When you start getting down to the size of individual atoms that's the end of the road for Moore's law and we'll eventually need a new law for quantum computing. Theoretically spintronics can be used for room temperature quantum computers and the first photonic 2 qubit chip was produced this year. The amount of information they can process increases factorially so assuming it can be done on a chip it would easily smash Moore's Law into the dust. A little weird to think a computer chip could process more data then the number of atoms it contains.

 

[Ben90]

Stacked transistors will likely continue Moore's law after process technology stops shrinking.

 

[LiuKangBakinPie]

"Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster." — Wirth's law

 

[Gibsons]

"Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster." — Wirth's law

Rephrased as "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away?"

 

[exdeath]

Unless this can be used to make non volatile faster data storage devices it doesn't matter. We need to stop making faster processors until we aren't reading/writing data off primitive magnetic HDD "tape cartridges" at 1.5 MB/sec random access. Hard drives are what are crippling our technology, and NAND SSDs aren't much faster when compared to CPU/RAM speed.

I want non volatile main memory consisting of 256 GB STT-MRAM thats so fast that CPUs don't even need cache, which frees up more space for cores at the same time.

Data access speed is what is killing us in this day and age of people hoarding terrabytes of data and still moving it at 20th century kilobyte/megabyte speeds. CPU and GPU doesn't even matter anymore until this problem is resolved with a breakthrough in material physics and zero wait state RAM/ROM.

That stupid light under that cylinder icon that is constantly on all the time is the only reason I ever have to wait on "modern technology", and the sooner that stupid symbol and light goes away the better our lives will be.

 

[exdeath]

"Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster." — Wirth's law

Ironically it's IBM making atrocious garbage like Blotus Notes that is contributing to that. It should never take 1,000+ files, 1+ GB disk space, 2GB RAM, 45 mins to install, and 5 minutes launching a shoddy virtual machine environment for a email client to parse and display a 3 kilobyte HTML email.....

 

[beginner99]

Ironically it's IBM making atrocious garbage like Blotus Notes that is contributing to that. It should never take 1,000+ files, 1+ GB disk space, 2GB RAM, 45 mins to install, and 5 minutes launching a shoddy virtual machine environment for a email client to parse and display a 3 kilobyte HTML email.....

I see another victim. We recently got upgraded from 6 to 8 or so and while it was slow before, now it is barley usable.

There are companies that actually but their IP in Notes databases (and believe its great). I guess it explains why they got bought up...

 

[capeconsultant]

Unless this can be used to make non volatile faster data storage devices it doesn't matter. We need to stop making faster processors until we aren't reading/writing data off primitive magnetic HDD "tape cartridges" at 1.5 MB/sec random access. Hard drives are what are crippling our technology, and NAND SSDs aren't much faster when compared to CPU/RAM speed.

I want non volatile main memory consisting of 256 GB STT-MRAM thats so fast that CPUs don't even need cache, which frees up more space for cores at the same time.

Data access speed is what is killing us in this day and age of people hoarding terrabytes of data and still moving it at 20th century kilobyte/megabyte speeds. CPU and GPU doesn't even matter anymore until this problem is resolved with a breakthrough in material physics and zero wait state RAM/ROM.

That stupid light under that cylinder icon that is constantly on all the time is the only reason I ever have to wait on "modern technology", and the sooner that stupid symbol and light goes away the better our lives will be.

Yes, please bring this on!