Today's NPR Talk of the Nation Science Friday radio program discussed the recent Memristor advances for the non-Electrical Engineer: "The possibility of such a circuit element, known as the "memristor," was first described in 1971, but no one was able to find a device with the properties of that missing element. Now, a group of scientists at HP Labs has found that in nanoscale materials, the "memristance" property becomes easier to see. The finding could lead to lower power, instant-on computers, as well as novel types of circuitry. HP Senior Fellow Stanley Williams, one of the discoverers of the modern memristor, talks about the find and its potential applications." The 13 minute program is available online
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Member since:2005-07-24
Was it you in that flying car that I saw going over my house the other day? Well, it looked like you, anyway. Nice tail fins! ;-)
Edited 2008-05-11 20:59 UTC
Member since:2005-07-08
Are you an EE or what?
I read the EET article too and another elsewhere and don't quite understand how we get to nirvana bit.
Seriously it sounds like all the talk of "this will really change my computer so it will always boot in a ms" is really just so much BS or just cluelessness. If you actually ran a small OS something like BeOS or even lighter, it actually could boot in a ms from a small Flash disk or MRAM. The old timers will remember that QNX once released a version with GUI and some small apps (including a modest browser IIRC) that really did fit on a floppy back in the day when every PC had one. Now 1.4MB. is small enough to fit in many caches today. Now bring that little beast up to date and it would be no big item to burn it into ROM and put the whole darn PC system on one chip.
The problem with our ever such sluggish computers isn't that the switching devices are still not yet fast enough and small enough, its that we have succumbed to pervasive bloat and absurd complexity at every level of the design both hardware and software. There is also the problem of the memory wall, the relative huge distance in performance between processor transistor speeds v DRAM or even disk rates both real disk and SSD. That only gets compounded by the oncoming thread wall.
Honestly the fastest OS-cpu out there is the one that does the least amount of work but still gets the same job done. I write this on a MiniMac OSX, the most sluggish PC I own but powered by the fastest processor I own. Seriously a 25yr old OS/PC running at a few MHz could boot from ROM in a sec, give it 1000x the cpu, and that would be 1ms boot time, there you go. Now somebody is going to point out it wouldn't do the same thing as todays wunderkind, I suppose it wouldn't.
rant mode off
Member since:2005-07-20
A majority of modern CPUs boot in less than a second. Much less in most cases.
I speak of embedded devices, of course, which outnumber every desktop CPU on the planet.
In many of these designs, if an error is detected, instead of handling the error the system reboots and is running again without anyone noticing it happened.
Member since:2006-01-16
I don't think you understand how this works. This memristor is a *passive* circuit element. That means it does not have to have power running through it to retain it's flux. Current memory technology looses everything once it looses power, but this type of technology doesn't. So even if you turn your computer off, everything would still be in memory. There's no need to boot up when turning on the computer because everything is already loaded.
This has nothing to do with speed, it has to do with being able to set a bit value and retaining it without having to feed the circuit element power.
Member since:
2006-01-16
I head the Science Friday NPR where this was discussed, but I think the EETimes article from about a week earlier was much more interesting:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=2074...
I think that in ten years, computers will no longer have memory or harddrives, but rather that everything will be stored using these memristors that will provide the functionality of both and will probably be embedded right on the CPU chip. Not to mention that there are lots and lots of transistors in computers and electronics that this little element can replace.
It will be cool when your system is completely booted even though it's off...