Olivetti 101
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IBM has scored a blow in the high-stakes prizefight for the title of next-generation non-volatile memory technology, revealing a prototype "racetrack memory" chip baked using the same silicon fab technologies as run-of-the-mill chippery. Racetrack memory, for those of you who haven't been scoring at home, is competing with …
" the racetrack memory's read head detects the edges of the magnetic stripes rather than their polarity" - that may be factual but is also exactly the way ordinary disk drives work: magnetic disk heads have always read the transitions between polarity regions. Without transitions, no signal. No signal, no data. So there is nothing new about detecting "the edge of stripes".