New Magnetic Flow Has Potential To Revolutionise Electronic Devices (ft.com) 40
An international research team has for the first time imaged and controlled a type of magnetic flow called altermagnetism, which physicists say could be used to develop faster and more reliable electronic devices. Financial Times: A groundbreaking experiment at a powerful X-ray microscope in Sweden provides direct proof of the existence of altermagnetism, according to a paper published in Nature on Wednesday. Altermagnetic materials can sustain magnetic activity without themselves being magnetic.
The team from the UK's Nottingham university that led the research said the discovery has revolutionary potential for the electronics industry. "Altermagnets have the potential to lead to a thousand-fold increase in the speed of microelectronic components and digital memory, while being more robust and energy-efficient," said senior author Peter Wadley, Royal Society research fellow at Nottingham.
Hard disks and other components underpinning the modern computers industry process data in ferromagnetic materials, whose intrinsic magnetism limits their speed and packing density. Using altermagnetic materials will allow current to flow in non-magnetic products.
The team from the UK's Nottingham university that led the research said the discovery has revolutionary potential for the electronics industry. "Altermagnets have the potential to lead to a thousand-fold increase in the speed of microelectronic components and digital memory, while being more robust and energy-efficient," said senior author Peter Wadley, Royal Society research fellow at Nottingham.
Hard disks and other components underpinning the modern computers industry process data in ferromagnetic materials, whose intrinsic magnetism limits their speed and packing density. Using altermagnetic materials will allow current to flow in non-magnetic products.
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Have you asked the Insane Clown Posse? https://tenor.com/view/icp-mag... [tenor.com]
Spintronics (Score:4, Insightful)
Altermagnetism [wikipedia.org] may have applications in Spintronics [wikipedia.org], where state is stored in the spin of electrons rather than bulk charge.
If it pans out, a thousand-fold increase in density and power consumption is plausible.
Disclaimer: TFA is paywalled and I haven't read it.
Re:Spintronics (Score:5, Informative)
The linked Nature article is open access and freely available.
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Some background articles that might be helpful:
Altermagnets: A new chapter in magnetism and thermal science [phys.org]
Altermagnetism: The Emergence of a New Magnetic Phase [apexmagnets.com]
Re: Spintronics (Score:4, Informative)
TBH, a thousand-fold increase in power consumption doesn't look all that attractive to me, not to mention the climate implications.
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TBH, a thousand-fold increase in power consumption doesn't look all that attractive to me
Hee hee. Yes, I should've proofread that.
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Don't let the naysayers get you down Bill. Your 1000 fold reduction in dummy load space requirements will change EVERYTHING!
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What? "Spintronics" is about electrons and not elections?
Re: Spintronics (Score:2)
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What century are they from? (Score:2)
Hard disk drives? Seriously?
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What do you mean?
Do you believe data warehouses are stored on nvme?
Check out a Backblaze annual report.
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If altermagnetism really boosts HDD density a thousand-fold, that will change the balance.
But micro-altermgnetism could also be used in SSDs based on spintronics, so who knows?
HDDs might still have a place for archival storage. They have a much longer shelf-life than SSDs.
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Huh? HDDs do not have a longer shelf-life than SDDs, if anything they're much less reliable:
https://blocksandfiles.com/202... [blocksandfiles.com]
Unless you mean unplugged and placed on a shelf for 100 years, but that's not the domain of HDDs, that's where optical media like M-DISC shines with a shelf life of over 1000 years.
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Huh? HDDs do not have a longer shelf-life than SDDs, if anything they're much less reliable:
https://blocksandfiles.com/202... [blocksandfiles.com]
Unless you mean unplugged and placed on a shelf for 100 years, but that's not the domain of HDDs, that's where optical media like M-DISC shines with a shelf life of over 1000 years.
For long shelf-life, use tape. The long-life problem with HDDs is not the media but the dependence on electronics that are intricately paired with the media. SSDs have the same electronics problem. Tape avoids this problem. Optical also avoids the problem, but the density and cost are not as good.
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Unless you mean unplugged and placed on a shelf
Yes. That's what "shelf life" means.
I have spun up and retrieved data from HDDs that were in storage for twenty years. There's no way you can do that with an SSD.
optical media like M-DISC shines
How many people have M-DISC?
At 100GB each, you'd need 40 of them to hold the same data as a single 4TB HDD. I have better things to do with my weekend than swapping discs.
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Agreed. This is the most common solution for long term retention of bulk data in enterprise datacenters, at least from what I've seen in the modern day. This allows massive amounts of data to be stored and retrieved rapidly. It's also very simple to move data offsite and to physically segregate client data.
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It is all about long (3-10yrs) term storage of bulk (multiple TB to 100's of TB) data.
This sector isn't generally about storing back issues of magazines for posterity but rather about storing a continuous real time stream of event and state information from tens of thousands of computing devices in an enterprise for compliance and security purposes.
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SSDs price goes down with Moore's Law, so roughly doubling in capacity every couple of years. That is to say you can buy an SSD with double the capacity in 2 years for
Re:What century are they from? (Score:4, Interesting)
SSDs price goes down with Moore's Law, so roughly doubling in capacity every couple of years. That is to say you can buy an SSD with double the capacity in 2 years for the same price today.
Long term, that trend will probably play out, but it hasn't held very steady.
February 2023, I got a 4TB Crucial MX500 for $239.99
Today, that same SSD is $308.29
That's nearly 2 years.
They still don't make a larger SSD (though some other brands do).
It's MORE expensive.
Demand for ever larger hard drives is still there - its why small hard drives of 2TB or less are basically non-existent ...
We really have two very distinct classes of storage for PC's now, but we're accessing them both the same way.
There's a conspiracy angle as well, now that the big HDD producers are also shipping a large proportion of the SSDs. They've gotta keep both of their products profitable and avoid having one department detrimentally competing with the other. I think they've been quite successful at keeping those markets distinct. For example, I doubt anyone is directly comparing an 8TB SSD (~$550-$700++) to an 8TB HDD ($100-$170) without immediately knowing which one they're going with (answer: a smaller SSD or a larger HDD).
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(answer: a smaller SSD or a larger HDD).
*and
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Correction, the price of ssd WAS dropping faster than spinning rust and they WERE expected to achieve price parity around 2030... before this development unexpectedly moved the target 1000 fold.
At least in theory, we see dozens of breakthrough's like this for every one that actually makes it into production.
If we went by the lab developments Moore would be crying because the industry crushes his law every few months but in reality it all somehow develops along a slow gradual progression that never undermine
Re: What century are they from? (Score:3)
Re: What century are they from? (Score:3)
Here's a much better explanation for the layman (Score:5, Informative)
https://phys.org/news/2024-02-... [phys.org]
My takeaway from the article is that magnetism arises from atoms in a crystalline matrix all aligning their spins in one direction, and anti-magnetism from atoms in the crystal reversing directions in successive layers, resulting in the material being non-magnetic. What's new are altermagnets, which have properties of magnetic materials without the cancelling out the forces. "Here enter altermagnets with the best of both: zero net magnetization together with the coveted strong spin-dependent phenomena typically found in ferromagnets—merits that were regarded as principally incompatible." So now other properties of the atoms such as spin can potentially be exploited to store information.
Paywalled! (Score:3)
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Amazon gift idea (Score:3)
Not sure why this is new today, given this Feb '24 (Score:1)
Non-paywalled sources (Score:2)
so... (Score:2)
fuckin' altermagnets, how do they work?
When? (Score:2)
Could (Score:2)
The extraordinary amount there is to be known (Score:3)
Reading the Nature article, I was struck once again by how vast the world of scientific knowledge is, and the depth of study required. I’m a layperson with a semi-scientific degree from 30 years ago; there’s no way for me to begin to understand what the following sentence means because I just don’t have enough relevant domain knowledge “The key principle involved is the breaking of time-reversal symmetry, which in ferromagnets is generated by an internal magnetization.” (Although I’m sure lots of people here do have that knowledge). There’s just so much to be known.
And then I think about the depressing absurdity that so many Americans are functionally illiterate, or worse. The staggering gulf between what it is possible to know and what so many people actually do know, and between humility in the face of apprehending the limits of your own knowledge versus confident showboat ignorance and a wilful denial that knowledge has power. Gah.