HP Reports Memory Resistor Breakthrough 141
andy1307 writes "Hewlett-Packard scientists on Thursday will report advances demonstrating significant progress in the design of memristors, or memory resistors. The researchers previously reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had devised a new method for storing and retrieving information from a vast three-dimensional array of memristors. The scheme could potentially free designers to stack thousands of switches on top of one another in a high-rise fashion, permitting a new class of ultra-dense computing devices even after two-dimensional scaling reaches fundamental limits."
I'd love to see this in a cell phone. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:And that is the difference... (Score:5, Interesting)
Forget replacing only RAM (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a really big deal. Since our brains work in much the same way as an array of memristors, this brings the possibility of an artificial brain (and perhaps artificial intelligence) much closer to reality.
Maybe I will live to see Data in my lifetime.
Re:Heat? (Score:2, Interesting)
I suspect that it might make heat pipes built into the memory boards to be a highly desirable option, (..)
Hardly - the maximum amount of heat loss would be limited by the application.
If you'd use this technology to build a SSD for a laptop or a portable media player, there are some hard upper limits on how much power (=heat) that SSD could draw. Things like battery life, the amount of heat a full system can deal with, acceptable noise levels for cooling fans, etc. If bandwidth = heat, the application would limit the maximum available bandwidth for a given power consumption.
With that constraint as a given, I suspect that even a 100- or 1000-layer thick stack of memory cells would be capable of transferring the heat to its surroundings. Each memory cell wouldn't need a good 'heat connection' to the outside world - just a heat transfer to neighbouring cells good enough to prevent hot spots. Also memory cells could be arranged such, that areas that appear close from a logical (programmer's) point of view, are widely distributed from a physical point of view.
Re:And that is the difference... (Score:1, Interesting)
Apple has a larger market cap than HP.
In any case, Apple's products are not exactly cutting edge technology. They're focused on style and ease of use. Most of their hardware R&D is probably about squeezing the most out of the cheapest per-unit-cost hardware possible (MP4 decoder chips, etc) and mass producing it in huge volumes.
Re:And that is the difference... (Score:1, Interesting)
Apple is a marketing firm and System Integrator. They take other peoples' technology, slap a pretty package around it and double the price. As easy as it is to mock Microsoft, we do have to admit they develop a lot of things in-house from scratch. They just don't always get the details right the first time around.
I sell off the shares of any company that cuts R&D before executive salaries, and/or ships jobs overseas in order to achieve short-term profits. Those firms will inevitably fail. IBM, anyone...?