It wasn't Sony but Hitachi. Sony was only responsible for Blu-ray, which is 2D optical storage. Hitachi attempted to develop 5D quartz storage but so far they only managed to achieve 3D. Meanwhile Project Silica is 5D. What makes 5D a huge jump from 2D or 3D is the fact that 5D utilizes amplitude and polarization which means a single written voxel can potentially store an entire byte, while 2D and 3D still only uses 1 bit per voxel.
The principle is straightforward enough, that's why it's such a good idea. But the practical problem is that lasers are expensive. The chart he showed where we need to store e23 bytes of data? That's a shitload of laser pulses, so you need a shitload of currently very expensive femtosecond lasers to generate these pulses. But the lasers are getting better in terms of bang for buck and quickly at that, it's not quite Moore's law but the improvement there is exponential so lots of things with lasers that weren't viable for cost reasons in the past are going to be so soon enough.
Poor Mark, delivering some well placed humor, and the crowd just /r/whoosh lol
yeah it's a bit bizarre
So a piece on media/tech that is safe for Linus to handle!
Good one! 😂
@@americafirst1st7 i was afraid someone had already said the joke.
This is awesome
Great progress. Thanks for the update Mark! 🫡
Just use papyrus
huh ... a version of ST:TNG isolinear chips
Sony did saving to glass years ago from what I remember.
It wasn't Sony but Hitachi. Sony was only responsible for Blu-ray, which is 2D optical storage. Hitachi attempted to develop 5D quartz storage but so far they only managed to achieve 3D. Meanwhile Project Silica is 5D. What makes 5D a huge jump from 2D or 3D is the fact that 5D utilizes amplitude and polarization which means a single written voxel can potentially store an entire byte, while 2D and 3D still only uses 1 bit per voxel.
The principle is straightforward enough, that's why it's such a good idea. But the practical problem is that lasers are expensive. The chart he showed where we need to store e23 bytes of data? That's a shitload of laser pulses, so you need a shitload of currently very expensive femtosecond lasers to generate these pulses. But the lasers are getting better in terms of bang for buck and quickly at that, it's not quite Moore's law but the improvement there is exponential so lots of things with lasers that weren't viable for cost reasons in the past are going to be so soon enough.