Tags: computer chips, hard drives, IBM, memory chips, nanotech
Computer and memory chips usually tend to get smaller over time, but a paper published Thursday in Science, IBM details how it’s building memory chips that would be 100 times more dense than today’s hard drives by starting with the smallest building blocks: atoms. Big Blue’s prototype chip is only 12 atoms across (click here for an awesome visualization of how small an atom is. No really, click it!) but is another way of thinking about ways to get beyond the limits of building ever-smaller chips keeping Moore’s Law on track.
Andreas Heinrich, the project lead for IBMs efforts, explained in an interview that this tech may never be realized in part because it requires an entirely new type of manufacturing equipment to be built. However, IBM is learning how to manipulate atoms for storing bits and identified a new type of magnetism that could one day be used. Unlike the type of magnetism that keeps your magnets stuck to your fridge, IBM is looking at the reverse of those properties to make this highly dense type of memory.
More at GigaOM
iOS 5.0.1 has landed, and the iPhone 4S experience is better as a result. Thanks to the update, the battery life bug which had been causing a large amount of pain to a small percentage of iPhone 4S users, is gone. The laundry list of other official improvements in 5.01 is brief: additional multitasking gestures for the iPad 1. Something about smoothing out the iCloud experience. That’s all well and good. But it’s what’s not on the list that’s of intrigue at this point. Other companies do it as well, but Apple in particular is known for slipping additional, under-the-radar improvements into their .x.x software updates. Why not announce it? Maybe it’s something the company want to advertise as having been a previous deficiency, but wants to improve upon nonetheless. That means iPhone 4S users now get to spend the next few days looking for other subtle signs of improvement in their iOS 5 experience. Did Apple, for instance, add refinements to the way in which Siri works? Perhaps some of the built-in apps launch just a bit faster on the 4S now than they did before. The search begins for what else iOS 5.0.1 has brought to the table.
Hewlett-Packard Co. agreed to buy security-software maker ArcSight Inc. for about $1.5 billion, continuing the company’s spending spree that began after Chief Executive Mark Hurd resigned last month.
SAN FRANCISCO – Authorities have smashed one of the world’s biggest networks of virus-infected computers, a data vacuum that stole credit cards and online banking credentials from as many as 12.7 million poisoned PCs.
Lest anyone be left out of the tablet/slate wave that’s currently crashing over the laptop and ultraportable industry, HP has announced a new 12.1-inch EliteBook convertible tablet for the business-minded who feel the need for pens and capacitive multitouch displays at the same time.
Intel on Monday started shipping a 160-GB, 2.5-inch solid-state drive for laptops and desktops.
Apple’s reported plans to introduce new laptops next week are seasoned with a particularly titillating rumor that the company will unveil an $800 laptop that would close much of the price gap with low-cost PC laptops.
Hewlett-Packard says it has achieved a mobile-computing milestone by getting the HP EliteBook 6930p to operate continuously for 24 hours on a single battery charge. The laptop used in the test is, however, rather different from those consumers would pick up at the store, at least for now.
