[Info-vax] OT: Memristor: Is a sea-change coming?

[Neil Rieck]

On Aug 24, 3:51 pm, Doug Phillips <dphil... at netscape.net> wrote:
> The discussions about HP's recent decisions have sparked these
> thoughts, but I couldn't find one (newer) thread where this fit so
> here you go.
>
> Not that I have a crystal ball, but I sense a technology revolution
> and sea-change on the horizon. So far, since the numeric control and
> programmable logic revolution, advances in computing have been
> evolutionary: smaller, cheaper, faster, more powerful ways of doing
> the same things.
>
> HP has been pretty quiet since 2010 about their memristor work. For
> those unfamiliar, read:
>
>  <http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2010/apr-jun/memristor.html>
>
> A speculative blog article from early 2010 is an interesting read:
>
> <http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/5/5/how-will-memristors-change-e...
>
>  if wrapped, <http://preview.tinyurl.com/2awdpux>
>
> Its author poses the question:
> ##
> "How will we design systems when we have access to a new material that
> is two orders of magnitude more efficient from a power perspective
> than traditional transistor technologies, contains multiple petabits
> (1 petabit = 128TB) of persistent storage, and can be reconfigured to
> be either memory or CPU in a package as small as a sugar cube (in a
> stacked configuration)?"
> ##
>
> Note that any "bit" can used as either logic or memory dynamically, as
> needed. And, unlike a transistor, one memristor can store not just one
> bit but any one of a range of values. The implications are mind-
> numbing (to me, at least).
>
> One 2011 article from physicsorg.com shows some research that has
> definite Star Trek implications.
>
>  <http://preview.tinyurl.com/3u7j6u6>
>
> HP has been quiet. I wonder what's happening that we don't know about,
> but which could possibly be driving some of HP's seemingly "strange"
> business decisions?
>
> Just thinking.

I posted some similar stuff (about HP's memristor) in this newsgroup
back in Dec 1, 2008. It contained a link to this IEEE article:

How We Found the Missing Memristor
http://spectrum.ieee.org/dec08/7024

Neil Rieck
Kitchener / Waterloo / Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/