A chip with 500.000 song capacity has been developed by IBM
Saturday, April 12th, 2008
Image via WikipediaAn article in a copy of the news paper Science which was published in earlier this week, a team at IBM’s research facility in San Jose, California, said they have created a new type of digital storage which would give a mobile audio device such as an iPod or MP3 player the capability to store about half a million songs - or 3,500 films. The price of such storage medium is far less to produce then the current storage mediums. Just as a point of reference, 500,000 songs are about 12 years of listening 8 hours a day.
The credit to the biggest available capacity in a mobile device is today give to iPod 160 gigabyte model. This iPod can store approximately 40.000 audio tracks.
The thoughts of a half-million song library in your pocket might be mind blowing however what might be more impressive and much more useful is enabling a new level of capabilities for mobile devices. Picture your self, caring around an office-worth of information on a device which is no bigger then a pack of chewing gum.
The devices that use this so called “racetrack” of memory technology, which uses “the spin of an electron to store data,” would require much less power to operate and is faster then a regular hard drive. These devices could operate for weeks in a row on one single battery charge.
IBM stated that the technology is currently only used in the laboratory environment, but that it expects that devices uses this new storage technology be on the market within ten years.