7 ms·
Vinyl records also don’t have 0’s and zeroes, it does not make them better than Blu-ray. MLC NAND have more than just 1’s and 0’s, they have 0..7 or even 0..15.
by failuser 3y ago
Vinyl records also don’t have 0’s and zeroes, it does not make them better than Blu-ray. MLC NAND have more than just 1’s and 0’s, they have 0..7 or even 0..15.
Does anyone really want to process analog data?
- vlovich123 3y ago> Does anyone really want to process analog data? I imagine at some point in the abstractions it'll get a compat layer. Also, I could be wrong about MLC NAND but I thought it still stored 0/1 and just had more bits stored per cell through stacking.
- whatevaa 3y agoNo, multi-level NAND has extra voltage levels. Instead of a just regular off (0) and on (1) they have intermediate states too. For QLC, that's 16 levels, it's quite granular, and the margins of error are very small.
- Retr0id 3y agoThe margins for error are wider than one might immediately assume, since they combine it with error correction codes.
- sp332 3y agoTLC NAND stores one of eight values in the cell. There aren't three separate values like 1, 0, 1, there is only one value, like "5".
- AussieWog93 3y agoI mean, 101 is just 5 in binary. So each cell stores either three pieces of binary or one piece of octal. It's the same thing.
- failuser 3y ago5 is not stored as 101, it’s stored as charge level number 5 out of 8 other valid charge levels.
- koromak 3y agoIts absolutely not the same thing from a hardware perspective. Normal components always operate on bits. We see "5", but the computer sees (at least) 3 bits. It then sends its output as bits to the next one. A 5 must require 3 wires, or 3 cycles of the clock over a single wire. Building a computer where each wire can encode multiple bits of data at the exact same time fundamentally changes the way operations are done. The entire thing would need to be built in a different way, with different consequences. It might be a bad idea, or impossible, but it would be different.
- mcdonje 3y ago1. Vinyl ridges are much larger than DVD lines. Kind of a silly comparison considering the article claims the density of this scheme would exceed what we currently have. 2. It appears to not be analog. >An energy barrier is created at the points where the bridges meet the device contacts, and the height of this barrier can be controlled which changes the electrical resistance of the overall material. That in turn is what encodes the data. That seems to indicate they can have a base-n encoding where n is what they can practically achieve with the barrier/bridge layering scheme.
- failuser 3y agoThey claim it’s continuous. If continuous values itself were that great then the vinyl records were great for data storage. The problem with continuous values is noise, durability and precision. You can made vinyl disks with incredibly high precision, but preventing damage and reading back those values is not practical. That’s why even the first analog laser medium had discrete pits and lands instead of a continuous signal.
- AnotherGoodName 3y agoIt can be continuous but still have a limit to data due to noise. In vinyls case the more data you store the higher the error rate (at some point the differences in states is hidden in noise). The data rate from a noisy channel or storage can be derived from Shannon-hartley theorem. This is why the old analogue phones could only do 56k for example.
- PhasmaFelis 3y ago> Does anyone really want to process analog data? If they can get it to encode binary data more densely than existing systems, with acceptable speed/reliability/cost? Yes, of course they would.
- kstrauser 3y agoMy understanding is that modern hard drives all use probability and error detection/correction to convert a gooey analog signal into chunky discrete goodness.
- dragontamer 3y ago> Does anyone really want to process analog data? I mean... maybe we should? All radio waves, such as 802.11, are fundamentally analog data. And then they are converted back into digital with incredible QAM-encoding levels. If you think QLC 4-bits per Flash-cell is big, wait till you see 256-QAM (aka: 8-bits per 802.11 timeslice), or more. I believe I saw some spec for some fiber-optic cable that is 32768-QAM (aka: 15-bits per timeslice). -------- Then again, Flash (and other memory) are composed of individual cells. True-analog signals like radio-waves are truly analog, so maybe its not quite the same. But maybe we should think of things like tape or hard-drives as an analog signal. Or maybe not, who knows? I'm not actually a storage specialist so I don't really know. (Nor am I really in communications, lol).
- foobiekr 3y ago256+ QAM is there but you will almost never see it in practice unless you’re next to the AP. Wifi7 defines up to 4096 so maybe the economics will drive improvements that didn’t land in 6E APs.
- enkid 3y agoI'm pretty sure that Einstein proved that light (including radio) is not, in-fact, analog, but rather has discrete levels of energy in quantum steps.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoI think this is a faulty analogy. The data is still encoded (or, at least, interpreted) as digital data, except that instead of each bit being just 0 or 1, you can have components that represent 0 to n. But each state is still discrete, the only difference is whether representing, say, 0 to 3 requires 2 components (2 bits) or a single component (a qit?).
- arcticbull 3y agoIsn't that just how MLC NAND works though? Also the article is just describing memristor memory isn't it? Intel's been shipping Optane memristor based memory (which they deny, but others are skeptical of the denial) for years, so clearly I'm missing something.
- meling 3y agoActually, Intel has discontinued Optane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/29/intel_optane_memory_dead/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/29/intel_optane_memory_d...
- cubefox 3y agoOptane was PCM , not ReRAM (memristor).
- noam_k 3y ago> ... representing, say, 0 to 3 requires 2 components (2 bits) or a single component (a qit?). I think the term you're looking for is trit (ternary/trinary digit).
- ggm 3y ago> Does anyone really want to process analog data? But.. you do all the time. pretty much all the time these binary states are calculated from curves, or approximations. The state isn't 1 or 0, its the set of states which make 1 or 0 depending, under error correcting codes, over-sampling, things like manchester encoding. We're fundamentally imposing binary on a non-binary state, by making deterministic judgement calls about which side of a divide things fall on, but to do that we have to look at analogue qualities. I like to imagine people who work in VLSI smile at this statement, but at some level its analogue everywhere. It's higher-states which get to act like its binary, but they map to an analogue signal substrate.
- sydbarrett74 3y agoWell, analogue everywhere until quantum effects come into play.
- coldtea 3y agoThis isn't about analog data. The states will still be quantized/digitized. Besides, currently used transistors in regular CPUs are analog too. And, does anyone want more than 0 and 1? If it's faster and has largest capacities, with equally feasible manufacturing, then yes.
- quench 3y agoThis would still be digital (discrete) not analog. For example you can have 4 voltage levels representing 00, 01, 10, 11 This technique is used in modems. So you can store more information in each memory location resulting in higher density.
- legulere 3y agoThere's an argument to be made, if reality isn't discrete (can be represented exactly by rational numbers) but continuous (can be represented by real numbers) you can represent programs that cannot be represented in a discrete way like a Turing machine. For instance the typical proof that the halting problem is unsolvable relies on there being just a discrete infinite amount of programs.
- freedude 3y agoThe quality of the media is in the perception of the user. Ask any audiophile if vinyl is best or not. Analog isn't really the issue here as there would be some kind of multiplexing/demultiplexing encoding or device to interface with it. It would still be discrete and have defined levels. as the technology advances you may be able to define more levels in the same bandwidth space thus creating "more" storage by greater efficiency of the spectrum.
- kazinator 3y agoThe encoding used on vinyl records has more information density than if zeros and ones were stored, say by two levels of the groove (or a closely related encoding like RZ or NRZ).