Many of you who work at a desktop in an office will probably have been in a situation where the lights flicker, and your co-workers then quickly urge everyone in the vicinity to ‘save’. It’s nice if you could know in advance of power outage coming, and sometimes you do get little warnings like these ones. But if you don’t and you’ve done a bunch of work without saving any time recently, well that’s going to be a problem. Or at least it’s a problem for now, as there’s a new type of computer chip that’s been developed that has the potential to save you from the frustration of having to do work over or anything of the sort. This is something that most of us can relate to if you spend the majority of your day working in front of a screen, and of course here at 4GoodHosting we’re like that in the same way that most Canadian web hosting providers would be too. Truth is the new technological advances in computing are coming fast and furious these days, and that’s a darn good thing. Spintronic devices are appealing alternatives to conventional computer chips, providing digital information storage that is extremely energy efficient plus relatively easy to manufacture on a large scale. The only current drawback for these devices, which depend on magnetic memory, is that they’re impeded by their relatively slow speeds in comparison to conventional electronic chips. Superior Speeds Magnetization switching is the term used for writing information into magnetic memory, and that’s what happens when data is saved to computer chips. What’s happened now is that there is a new technique for it where the speeds are nearly 100 times faster than state-of-the-art spintronic devices. This creates the potential for ultrafast magnetic memory in computer chips, and so fast in fact that data would be retained even if there was no power. This is achieved using very short, 6-picosecond electrical pulses to switch the magnetization of a thin film in a magnetic device. And the key is that being done with great energy efficiency. A picosecond is one-trillionth of a second. Whereas with conventional computer chips,...
