back to article HP & Hynix join forces for memristor fab

HP is partnering with Hynix to bring Memristor technology from lab to fab. The Memristor, posited as a fourth basic electrical circuit element, is said by HP to have the potential to be a form of uniform memory that could replace flash (being non-volatile), DRAM and even hard disk drives. It could possibly perform logic …

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  1. Ian Michael Gumby
    Thumb Up

    Go HP! GO!

    I almost said speed racer... but well... ok call me silly in being excited.

    The fact that this is a radical game changer that could help keep up Moore's Law.

    The really cool thing is that if successful you can remove the spinning hard drive out of the equation if you can make these dense enough, and durable enough to last at least 5+ years.

  2. Alan Esworthy
    Headmaster

    Exciting news, and 10 times less what?

    The original news of HP's discovery was quite exciting, and this news that actual products are likely forthcoming in the near future is very good news indeed.

    <pedant>

    You say, "HP reckons memristor products could run 10 times faster than flash memory and draw 10 times less power. "

    Do you mean "draw 90% less power" or "one tenth the power"? The phrase "x times less" is an innumerate abomination.

    </pedant>

    1. Disco-Legend-Zeke
      Thumb Up

      Pedant

      I agree, we see this egregious usage much too frequently, especially in TV commercials.

  3. A J Stiles
    FAIL

    More vapourware

    Anyone remember "magnetic bubble memory" from the 1980s, that was always going to be the next big thing?

    Memristors will go the same way.

  4. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Memristors versus bubble memory

    Regrading memristors going to the wayside like bubble memory, maybe. But the problem bubble memory had was it was trying to compete mainly with hard drives, and they became faster and cheaper than bubble memory. Bubble memory stayed on in applications that required ruggedness. Later on, when flash came out, it was so much faster than bubble memory that it displace it in the remaining markets.

    Memristors? The big problem was to discover and develop them to begin with, which has been done. The manufacturing techniques appear to be quite conventional, they've been ramped up already to 1ns speeds, and should use less space per bit than flash (so it should be cheaper than flash), and no write life limit. I would not have guessed flash would have taken off as much as it has, given how much more costly it is than conventional hard disks, but it has -- and I think that is going to be memristor memory's competitor rather than competing with hard disks.

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