GMR
September 12, 2007 8:27 AM Subscribe

It's called the Giant Magnetoresistive effect and it could one day allow electronic devices to hold 10 to 100 times the data in the same amount of space. "That means the iPod that today can hold up to 200 hours of video could store every single TV program broadcast during a week on 120 channels." [nyt]
posted by chuckdarwin (37 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite

"New... powerful... hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination."

iPod nano, classic, touch, terminator...
posted by spish at 8:32 AM on September 12, 2007 [1 favorite]

How big is that in Encyclopedias Brittanica or the state of Rhode Island?

You have to love an effect with the word "giant" built right in. Also, I need one of those 120 channel, weeklong iPods. That'd probably hold 20-25 years of shows at my TV watching rate, so I could save some space in the ol' living room by throwing away my TV.
posted by DU at 8:33 AM on September 12, 2007

The more interesting point, which the article just briefly touched upon, involved the way information will not only be stored, but accessed in the future.

I seriously doubt information will be stored in the file structure format we see today. Instead, with near ubiquitous Internet, the chips will merely act as a buffer or repository for recently accessed or popular files. Terabytes of data on a single chip are relatively useless unless there's an interface to accurately sort and process that data. I already have problems on my iPod or other non-keyboard devices on accessing large catalogs of music and video. The turn wheel is great, but fails supremely at large datasets.

So yes, "a weeks worth of cable programming on a single chip" is a catchy sentence, but navigating and sorting that data is both a logistical and computational hurdle that hasn't been solved.
posted by geoff. at 8:40 AM on September 12, 2007

Huh. I thought pretty much all hard drives had already switched from the plain-ol' magnetoresistive effect to GMR back in the '90s or early '00s. Some of those articles are pretty old.

The NYT article is talking about some sort of nano-abacus "racetrack" memory, not GMR.
posted by hattifattener at 8:43 AM on September 12, 2007

One day, for GMR, I think came and passed in the 1990s. The article in the Times seems to be about another possible advance by the same researched called "racetrack memory".
posted by ~ at 8:44 AM on September 12, 2007

Rats! On preview what hattifattener said, and on non-idiot mode "researcher" not "researched".
posted by ~ at 8:45 AM on September 12, 2007

"That means the iPod that today can hold up to 200 hours of video could store every single TV..."

If my ipod playback setup starts to look any more like this, my girlfriend will kick me out.
posted by StickyCarpet at 8:47 AM on September 12, 2007

Terabytes of data on a single chip are relatively useless unless there's an interface to accurately sort and process that data.

subvocalized commands to a mastoid implant?

10th gen iPod has a neural processor w/Kerenzekov Boost!
posted by dubold at 8:48 AM on September 12, 2007

With faster communications networks, will we really need memory for things like playback?

If the network was fast enough you wouldn't need a storage on your ipod. Buying a song from iTunes would simply mean granting you access to a song on their servers. You still have your playlists, and libraries, but they would be pointers into a central repository. If the network is fast enough and reliable enough, you wouldn't notice the difference between that and the current devices.

Frankly, it's a bit of a waste for everyone to spend money on drives that are going to be filled with copies of the same movies and music.
posted by Pastabagel at 8:49 AM on September 12, 2007

Point taken, ~

I mean that research based on said effect.
posted by chuckdarwin at 8:51 AM on September 12, 2007

The only thing that I would want to do with that much storage is something that IP holders don't want: digital media. I don't want to sound like Bill Gates, but I already only use my 300gb hd by ripping DVDs to it temporarily. Also, it might be smaller, but we'll see if it gets cheaper.

I have the exact same feeling. I bought a 250GB SATA drive earlier this year because it was literally the smallest SATA drive they had at the store at the time. I would have to work to figure out a way to store 250 GB of stuff on a drive. Seven years of drawing comics and having high-res image files yeilds maybe 10.

Christ, I would be afraid to have that much data on one drive. I would need to buy a second just to back it all up out of fear one slight problem could kill the whole thing. All hail my world's largest PhotoShop scratch disk!
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 8:54 AM on September 12, 2007

Yeah, this post title is incorrect and misleading.
posted by null terminated at 8:55 AM on September 12, 2007

If the network was fast enough you wouldn't need a storage on your ipod. Buying a song from iTunes would simply mean granting you access to a song on their servers. You still have your playlists, and libraries, but they would be pointers into a central repository. If the network is fast enough and reliable enough, you wouldn't notice the difference between that and the current devices.

This already exists with video on digital cable channels, and we're on our way with music- I've been to many bars in the last few years where the "jukebox" is now a internet-accessible MP3 playing system that takes your order and then downloads the song from a central server.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 8:58 AM on September 12, 2007

So yes, "a weeks worth of cable programming on a single chip" is a catchy sentence, but navigating and sorting that data is both a logistical and computational hurdle that hasn't been solved.

Well, actually, the interface for that will probably be simpler than the interface on your TV. In effect, this is a Nano-DVR on which, instead of selectively recording what you want to watch, you just record everything (or, you could record 6 weeks of programming on the 20 channels you might ever watch). Finding one program out of a few thousand should be easy with an i-Phone-type interface.

The bigger interface challenge would be with text files; you might be able to carry around the entire Library of Congress (about 10 terabytes) on a keychain, but you'd need some real computational power and a more complex interface to search and select what you need.
posted by beagle at 9:03 AM on September 12, 2007

on your TV
I meant to say, on your TIVO
posted by beagle at 9:05 AM on September 12, 2007

Nice Cyberpunk reference, dubold.
posted by rush at 9:42 AM on September 12, 2007

It is possible that digital entertainments and documents of the future (cue theremin) will require more memory per second, or what have you, then the lousy 2D video of today. Hence, more memory will be good, whether it is put to use storing huge files or huge complicated client apps.
posted by Mister_A at 9:54 AM on September 12, 2007

So yes, "a weeks worth of cable programming on a single chip" is a catchy sentence, but navigating and sorting that data is both a logistical and computational hurdle that hasn't been solved.

I think the standard Comcast digital cable interface is passable on a TV, why not on an iPod? Browse channel listings, browse categories, have a favorites list, browse related.. seems easy
posted by white light at 10:08 AM on September 12, 2007

> Giant Magnetoresistive effect?

The 1950's called. They want their noir sci-fi outre back.

Yeah, really, that was them on my iAxon. They were calling... from the future!
posted by humannaire at 10:27 AM on September 12, 2007

Whenever any discussion like this happens, I think back to the basement of a company I worked at. Filled with cartons and cartons of Syquest 40MG cartridges. A whole basement to contain what you now can on a few thumbdrives. And this was not even ten years ago.
posted by Peter H at 11:23 AM on September 12, 2007

Kids today, bah!
posted by Peter H at 11:23 AM on September 12, 2007

Seriously though, as a final comment - have you held a Syquest cartridge recently, or even a zip disc? They feel like such flimsy rattling bricks now. Which is weird because I remember how freeing they felt. Back six thousand years ago or so. (reminisces)
posted by Peter H at 11:31 AM on September 12, 2007

Bring on the neural implants!
posted by Pollomacho at 11:31 AM on September 12, 2007

The superfluous links to various pages about GMR have relatively little to do with the newspaper piece on racetrack memory apart from that the Fellow working on racetrack worked on GMR -- a completely common, damn near ubiquitous technology today -- ten years ago. Racetrack is still in the lab. GMR is already heavily commercialized across the storage industry. They are not the same thing, but your post conflates them.
posted by majick at 11:39 AM on September 12, 2007

Isn't reminiscing about memory rather recursive?
posted by quin at 12:58 PM on September 12, 2007 [1 favorite]

Um, At DivX quality, an 80 GB iPod should be able to store 230 hours of video easily, and almost 600 hours of youtube quality video. Not very suprising, since GMR has been in consumer products for quite a while, and is nearing it's limit.

Soo... wtf?
posted by delmoi at 1:34 PM on September 12, 2007

Isn't reminiscing about memory rather recursive?

Only if said memory stored our brains. So perhaps after the Kurzweilean singularity.
posted by delmoi at 1:43 PM on September 12, 2007

If the racetrack idea can be made commercial, he will have done what has so far proved impossible — to take microelectronics completely into the third dimension and thus explode the two-dimensional limits of Moore’s Law, the 1965 observation by Gordon E. Moore, a co-founder of Intel, that decrees that the number of transistors on a silicon chip doubles roughly every 18 months.

Just as with Mr. Parkin’s earlier work in GMR, there is no shortage of skeptics at this point.

Sorry... I should have started with his work on GMR and moved to racetrack before going to the nyt article.
posted by chuckdarwin at 1:43 PM on September 12, 2007

Sorry... I should have started with his work on GMR and moved to racetrack before going to the nyt article.

Is that how it's supposed to work? An FPP shouldn't need a manual.

The NYT piece is really a mess. It's a mishmash of jargon about diffrent things and diffrent types of things (chips and hard drives, for example)

Talking about 'the third dimension' is sort of beside the point. Chips already have multiple layers, but the problem isn't that making a 3-d chip is impossible, it would just be really expensive, and impossible to keep cool.

I mean I'm not an electrical engineer, so my understanding of this stuff is just as someone interested in it, but even to me the article seemed super-wack.

As I pointed out, an iPod can already store much more then 200 hours of video, using a hard drive. And you could easily stuff enough chips in there to store it using flash as well. It's just that those chips are so expensive these days, but in a few years they'll be very cheap. You can get an 8gb SD card (well SDhc) for $72. So ten would cost $700 or so. Not impossible.

Bad science writing strikes again.
posted by delmoi at 2:08 PM on September 12, 2007 [1 favorite]

Thanks, but I'll wait for Singularity to make existence obsolete.
posted by blue_beetle at 3:05 PM on September 12, 2007

You have to love an effect with the word "giant" built right in.

Meet colossal magnetoresistance.
posted by bread-eater at 4:46 PM on September 12, 2007

If the network was fast enough you wouldn't need a storage on your ipod. Buying a song from iTunes would simply mean granting you access to a song on their servers. You still have your playlists, and libraries, but they would be pointers into a central repository. If the network is fast enough and reliable enough, you wouldn't notice the difference between that and the current devices.

And then, Apple could take away all your music on a whim! I'll keep up my illegal downloading, thanks.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 5:09 PM on September 12, 2007

Oh yeah, colossal magnetoresistance, now that's what I'm talking about!
posted by humannaire at 7:54 PM on September 12, 2007

“scientists have questioned the very nature of the metallic state in these materials”! OK, colossal magnetoresistance ftw!
posted by hattifattener at 12:17 AM on September 13, 2007

Worth a Nobel Prize or two.

Now, how do I backdate this comment? Oh, forget it.
posted by Gyan at 7:26 AM on October 9, 2007

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