Old And Busted: Moore's Law. New Hotness: Areal Density
Multicore chips are a kind of cheating as far as Moore's Law goes. You're bringing a gang to the fight for faster processors. The battle to store the information those chips handle is where a lot of the action is now. Wired took a tour at Seagate's R and D labs, and they're talking about terabits per inch now:
Their current solution to this problem is recording data perpendicular to the plane of the media. This technology, however, is expected to peak out at about 1 terabit per square inch. In the next decade, Seagate plans to hit the market with twin technologies that could fly far beyond, ultimately offering as much as 50 terabits per square inch. On a standard 3.5-inch drive, that's equivalent to 300 terabits of information, enough to hold the uncompressed contents of the Library of Congress.
All over the world, people are reading the article and performing calculations of how many jpegs of Jessica Alba and Melissa Theuriault equal the uncompressed Library of Congress.
