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The Goods

pehaps some of you have herd of this already. I found this rather interesting.

urgh. before i even get close to understanding Quantum computing techniques, we now also have Magnetic computing?

This is even harder to understand than the Quantum stuff :-/

Sounds nifty. too bad its probably a decade out or so in practice.

Ok now that is really cool. So we have hope for maintaining Moore's law for another few decades

Avder wrote:Sounds nifty. too bad its probably a decade out or so in practice.

My thoughts exactly. :\\ They said that it's ideal for space stuff as it's not as fragile... but aren't there some nasty magnetic fields in space that might pose a problem from time to time?

It sounds interesting, but this also brings us back to hard drives and how unreliable magnetic media is. The processing aspect of it is interesting, but using it as storage is far more interesting since it is non-volatile solid state storage. The magnetic platters in hard drives wear out far less often then the mecanical read heads and spindle motors.

It sounds like they're using a similar lithography process for producing these magnetic chips as used for standard chips. Neat.

Also, they have computers in space already. They have to use something to store the data in case of a total power failure, so the background radiation problem is probably already solved.

Any predictions on when it'll be fully functional, if ever?

DCrazy wrote:It sounds like they're using a similar lithography process for producing these magnetic chips as used for standard chips. Neat.

Also, they have computers in space already. They have to use something to store the data in case of a total power failure, so the background radiation problem is probably already solved.

Sort of, Nasa is using computers on the shuttles and space station steps behind current technology, like pentium 3's or lower. I guess they still don't trust the newer chips to perform in the radiation.

Yup wingy, I remember a few years ago the Hubble got a serious CPU upgrade in the form of a Pentium overdrive processor instead of the 486 it was using.