An Examination, in Nine Haiku, of IBM’s Breakthrough in Racetrack Memory

How do computers
Remember? By disc and RAM,
And now by “racetrack”!

Discs spin, cheap but slow;
RAM is quicker but costly;
Racetrack’s fast and cheap.

Sponsor

Racetrack uses spin
Momentum, sliding data
Back and forth on nanowires.

Who developed it?
IBM (old dog, new tricks).
They are on a roll.

They manipulate
Magnetic states of regions
At the speed of jets.

To seek, to find, to
Yield up a datum:
A second’s billionth part.

Spintronic currents
Shoot domain walls down the track;
Distance equals pulse.

There are no plans yet
To monetize this breakthrough,
Just imagine, though.

All movies released
In a year on your cell phone
Off one triple-A.

***

We welcome comments,
As long as they’re in haiku,
If longer, tanka.

Sources: Linus for Devices, IBM Research, Science, Basho

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