Diamonds Are Data Storage’s
Best Friend
It’s easy to assume that flash memory will replace other forms of physical storage media in the not-so distant future, but new research from a team of Johns Hopkins engineers might have something to say about that. It seems the team has discovered some new properties of GST, or the inexpensive alloy of germanium,
antimony, and tellurium that is commonly used to construct rewritable optical media, such as DVD-RW discs. The process that we’ve been using for many years now involves using lasers to heat tiny, precise areas of the GST surface of a disc, changing the heated portion from its amorphous state without ordered atomic arrangement to a crystalline state; these states are read by a drive’s read laser as the ones and zeros of binary data storage. The researchers found that using tiny diamond tips to apply pressure to the GST allowed them to more precisely control the phase change process, allowing for more than the traditional binary states.
Professor of Materials Science and Engineering En Ma says, “Instead of going from black to white,it’s like finding shades or a shade of gray in between. If you have multiple states, you can store a lot more data.” Doctoral student Ming Xu, the team’s lead study author, says, “This phase-change memory is more stable than the material used in the current flash drives. It works 100 times faster and is rewritable about 100,000
times. Within about five years, it could also be used to replace hard drives in computers and give them more memory.”
ARCTIC Adds ATSC Tuners To Its MC001 Line
ARCTIC announced recently that it has added ATSC tuners to its entire line of MC001 Entertainment Center units, including the MC001-BD and MC001-DVD variants, which incorporate Blu-ray
Disc and DVD players, respectively. These passively cooled Windows 7-compatible PCs support 1080p
video, 7.1-channel surround sound audio, and a plethora of web media services such as Netflix, Amazon
Instant Video, and more. They are compatible with a wide array of multimedia file formats, including
MP3, M4A, WMA, WMV, AVI, MKV, and H.264, and provide multi-room entertainment and
remote control via iOS and Android phone apps. In addition, all units in the MC001 line now also come
with built-in HDTV tuners, so you can add OTA or other digital TV sources to the units’ repertoire.
NVIDIA Unveils Kepler Tesla Products
You know the drill: whenever NVIDIA launches a new GPU architecture, it debuts the new chips in its GeForce desktop graphics products and then moves it into its professional GPU compute products. As the company showed during its GPU Technology Conference in May, Kepler will be no exception.
NVIDIA showed off its Kepler-powered Tesla products, both current and future, and discussed the benefits of the new architecture vs. Fermi, which was in itself a big step forward in GPU compute power. Kepler
