Memristor - A new memory technology that might just change our world.

Memristor Technology

I have blogged about memory technology before, however, an article I stumbled over a few days ago got my attention more than any other in recent years!

When you look inside a computer today there are a whole bunch of components that need to communicate with each other in order for the computer to work. The CPU is arguably the most important component as it controls the show and distributes information to the various components as required.

The problem with this system is that distributing information to various components takes both time and power.

The only reason we have separate ram modules is because it’s too expensive to put it all on the CPU – even the most powerful and expensive CPUs today have a max of around 8Mb of “on chip” cache. Further more, the only reason we have hard drives is that that ram is too expensive to store large amounts of data, not to mention all data is lost if the power fails.

In a perfect world your processor, ram and hard drive would come together as one offering both amazing speed and frugal power usage.  Some of the worlds smartest minds have been chasing this holy grail for many years and just recently HP’s Quantum science research facility believe they have it; the Memristor.

Believed possible in theory since 1971 it took until 2008 for a prototype to be produced.  Now Stan Williams, senior fellow at Hewlett-Packard and director of Quantum Science Research believes Memristors will come to market in the next 3 years.

For the non-geeks out there reading this saying “whatever…it’s just another new memory type“. Think again, think Minority report,  I Robot, Terminator etc…Memristors could make it possible to create the first computers capable of truly learning!!

Here is a summary of the Memristor features:

• Memristors can work  as DRAM with the added benefit of not requiring power to retain data.
• Memristors will be cheap enough to also act as a hard drive.
• And the big one -Memristors can act as a processor! However, unlike conventional transistors which are either on or off Memristors can represent may states which opens up a new world of possibilities including artificial intelligence.

The combined benefits of these features has the potential at a minimum to give us computers that turn on and off instantly, run quickly and consume little power. At it’s best it could mean humanoid assistants in our home which can think and act by themselves.

Depending on which movies you watch this could either be terrifying or extremely exciting.

Here are a couple of articles you may read if you want to know more:

• Demystifying the Memistor
• The miraculous Memristor