New Superfast Memory Chips

Ghent would be drooling over this news…IBM has unveiled the prototype Racetrack memory chip which boosts read/write speeds to potentially a 100,000 times faster than current commercial hard disks. That’s a big boast, and if the technology can live up to the claim, consumers could see an enormous change in the IT market.

According to BBC News, the Racetrack technology relies on magnetic nanowires which can convey electrical pulses. Using the electrical pulses, they can manipulate magnetic read/write heads to create the standard 1’s and 0’s that represent data. The data is raced along the wires, hence “Racetrack.”

“This breakthrough could lead to a new type of data-centric computing that allows massive amounts of stored information to be accessed in less than a billionth of a second.” -IBM

Unfortunately they are still in the testing phases of the technology, so we won’t be seeing this at the store any time soon. However, the future of computers is definitely moving forward with a promise of greater speed. With an alternative hard drive technology that can operate on levels of RAM, informational flow would be dramatically improved. Faster internet browsing for consumers on their smartphones, improved gaming speeds, and not to mention some truly astonishing potential for robots. Conceivably Racetrack memory would be faster, cheaper, and more durable than hard drives and RAM, thus replacing both technologies.

Here’s an in-depth visual overview of how the tech works:

More details on the technology will become available from the International Electron Devices meeting which is being held in Washington D.C. this week.