HP Backs Memristor Mass Production 116
neo12 writes with news that Hewlett-Packard is teaming with Hynix Semiconductor, the world's second-largest producer of memory chips, to mass produce memristors for the first time. Quoting the BBC:
"HP says the first memristors should be widely available in about three years. The devices started as a theoretical prediction in 1971 but HP's demonstration and publication of a real working device has put them on a possible roadmap to replace memory chips or even hard drives. ... Steve Furber, professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester, explained that the potential benefits lie in the fact that memristors are 'much simpler in principle than transistors. Because they are formed as a film between two wires, they don't have to be implanted into the silicon surface — as do transistors, which form the storage locations in Flash — so they could be built in layers in 3D,' he told BBC News. 'Of course, the devil is in the detail, and I don't think the manufacturing challenges have been fully exposed yet.'"
Re:layered in 3 dimensions...hmmm (Score:2, Insightful)
"memory sizes could expand geometrically"
Yes yes yes, and about 12 picoseconds behind that the software morons will increase bloat exponentially.
Re:Can someone explain how the memristor work? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:layered in 3 dimensions...hmmm (Score:2, Insightful)
"I like my 2-gigabyte operating system much better than the 2-megabyte operating system I used in 1993"
But do you like it 1048x as well? If the difference in size were multimedia I might be inclined to let it go but it isn't. Also your numbers are off, the current version of most popular OS is about triple that.
Re:Can someone explain how the memristor work? (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess they would even contain refresh mechanisms similar to DRAM, run some current in the right direction from time to time.
Re:layered in 3 dimensions...hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Haven't heard of this one (Score:5, Insightful)
Memristor based crossbar switches will be extremely useful for two uses:
Shuffling data between VMs in a secure manner on a host such as an IBM 795 or a zSeries that has a large number of VMs in use for different tasks. This way a bunch of VMs that talk amongst themselves frequently (a DB server to an app server) will end up being able to do high I/O without that slamming the CPU.
Another use is tiered memory, where one has a machine with fast RAM and slow RAM, with slow RAM being exponentially faster than going to SSD or magnetic platters. If memristors become able to be printed on a large scale, perhaps we will see machines with 16-32 GB of DRAM, then 256-512 GB of memristive RAM that is used as both swap space, but also a persistant cache for the OS to boot from an image with, never touching the storage media until the OS is fully loaded and the user wants to load documents, or the OS is doing a backup.
Re:layered in 3 dimensions...hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering that a 1.35GB hard drive cost $1800 in 1993 [jcmit.com], and a 1.5TB (over 1048x the storage) is only $90 right now, and as 2MB is ~.15% of the 1.35GB disk, and 2GB is ~.13% of the 1.5TB disk, I'd say he could like it less and it'd still be an improvement.