The research breakthrough isn’t yet practical, but it’s the direction the industry is headed. Imagine storing 26 million songs in your smartwatch.
A view of the single holmium atom used IBM to store a 1 or 0.
In the never-ending quest to improve computing technology, IBM has just taken a big step smaller: It’s found a way to store data on a single atom.
A hard drive today takes about 100,000 atoms to store a single bit of data — a 1 or 0. The IBM Research results announced Wednesday show how much more densely it might someday be possible to cram information.
How much more densely? Today, you can fit your personal music library into a storage device the size of a penny. With IBM’s technique, you could fit Apple ‘s entire music catalog of 26 million songs onto the same area, Big Blue said.
Atomic-level storage could radically change our computing devices. A smartwatch or ring could carry all your personal data, or businesses could keep potentially useful information that today they can’t currently afford to preserve. And socking away lots of information is important for artificial intelligence, which has a voracious appetite for data used to train machine-learning systems to do their jobs.
The development is a step toward a vision outlined by famed physicist Richard Feynman, a pioneer of the possibilities of quantum computers that work at atomic scales. « We can in principle make a computing device in which the numbers are represented by a row of atoms, with each atom in either of the two states, » Feynman said in a 1983 talk.
IBM researcher Chris Lutz stands by a microscope he and colleagues used to store a bit of data on a single atom at IBM Research’s Almaden campus.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
