IBM’s Racetrack, Sequoia and 28nm technology
IBM might soon grab the lions share in the memory market with it’s new innovation Racetrack set to drastically shrink the size and price of all of your electronic gadgets. The new memory technology is reported to be much faster and 100 times less expensive than flash memory.
Christopher Marrows, a physicist at England’s University of Leeds, says racetrack memory, currently under development at IBM, will be a vast improvement over today’s leading computer memory technology – hard disk and flash – which each have serious limitations.”This technology will allow you to have the best of both worlds – cheap nano-size with huge memory in 3G phones, MP3 players, camcorders and other devices,” says Marrows. “But, more importantly, there will be more sites that will be able to give away storage for free, like YouTube.com and Gmail.com.” as quoted on montrealgazette.
With all parts static data stored on racetrack moves around on a wire pushed by spiralling magnetics, unlike hard disks in which a motor-operated head, much like a record player, has to move to the data to read it.Apart from consuming very less power Racetrack seems to have a possibility of being one million times faster than hard disks without the risk of wearing out.
On the Supercomputer front IBM is all set to build a hugely powerful supercomputer named sequoia which will be capable of performing at 20 petaflops per second, twenty times faster than the current record holder, namely the 1 petaflop Roadrunner machine. Occupying 3,422 square feet space the beast machine will contain more than 1.6 million processors and will reportedly have 1.6TB of memory and will run Linux.
In another news IBM and it’s chip partners Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Global Foundries, Infineon Technologies, Samsung Electronics, and STMicroelectronics have all agreed to share the burden of creating 28 nm HKMG processor. Intel has already rolled out HKMG in it’s current 45 nm and is aggressively transitioning to 32nm Westmere putting competition way behind. Now IBM with early production of it’s 28nm process is trying to cope up with the red ocean semiconductor market.
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