Linked by David Adams on Thu 1st May 2008 18:47 UTC, submitted by james_parker
First theorized in the 1970's as the fourth basic circuit element, a practical memristor implementation has finally been discovered at HP Labs. If practical manufacturing can be scaled up, memristor technology could become the new standard for computer memory -- memory that combines the speed of DRAM, the persistence of Flash memory, and the bit density of hard drives. In addition, memristors can work as analog as well as digital devices, and hold promise as the basis for building neural networks
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Member since:2006-02-09
Good call. Even better than eliminating the ram/disk dichotomy would be eliminating the ram/disk/cache trichotomy (if that's a word). It's impressive how we can immediately think of awesome applications for something like this but I'm sure that it will take quite some time for the "killer app" for this technology to come along. When it does though, I'd imagine it is likely to cause some huge changes throughout all technology- just consider how important the switch from vacuum tubes to transistors was.
Member since:
2005-06-29
If this proves out, it is certainly likely to eliminate the RAM/disk dichotomy as we know it. However, I do think we will still have something like it for removable storage, and possibly expanding storage.
I also hope that it proves to be as fast as SRAM, not just DRAM -- if so, we can rewrite the rules entirely on CPU caches -- they would probably still exist to eliminate memory contention across all CPU cores, but they would no longer be needed to handle the widening difference between cache and main memory performance.