Comments on: Spintronics may save Moore's Law

A joint effort by four universities looks to harness the spin of electrons for next chip breakthroughs.

[PetrG]

Startup time and performance bottlenecks

"a technology that one day could lead to computers that begin working as soon as the power comes on"

Startup time is determided by necessity to load OS image and other programs into memory (not by processing power) because memory contents is lost when power is off. Modern computer systems have a number of other bottlenecks that slow them down. E.g. memory access is times slower than processor can operate - we need CPU caches. HDD access is astonishingly slow - we need filesystem caches. Ratio between CPU operation delays and HDD delays is about 1000000 times! This IS the problem that should be solved.

And exciting technology that probably can solve many of these problems (and therefore boost performance, especially if software account on it) is described at this site http://atomchip.com/. And it is already in production according to the site.

Although I have yet to see any performance tests with real-world applications of systems with this memory architecture.

BTW Using single type of memory for all needs could significantly simplify operating system design and applications architecture in general. Just think about the fact that we do not need any persitence frameworkds and complex DBMSes anymore if we do not lose memory contents after power-off.

It seems I went offtopic a little...

[Mark Everitt]

That site is a farce...

The atom chip site claims technology that does not yet exist. I
know this because I work in this area. You only have to look at
the pictures on this page http://atomchip.com/_wsn/
page3.html to see that. On top of this, quantum computers are
so completely different to the classical model of computation,
that an existing OS would be able to operate.

On the memory side of things, it would be nice to see old HDs
phased out. Unfortunately flash memory cannot be written to
enough times to make this a viable option yet, and I think a
large parallel bank of flash memory would be the best
alternative to date.

[grey_eminence]

1.2 Petabyte Spintronics Technology

http://colossalstorage.net