Seems an optimistic timeline to 'reinvent' memory. They have perhaps forgotten about 'bubble memory' which was going to 'eliminate disks' in 1982.<p>From the article : "As reported by The Register, at a recent conference in Oxnard, California, HP’s Stan Williams said that commercial memristor hardware will be available by the end of 2014 at the earliest."<p>So basically we'll get to see real devices perhaps at the end of 2014 (I'm guessing closer to 2017 but we'll see) And we need a couple of years of building/using/repairing them before we see wide spread design wins, then another year before 'memristor' enabled devices hit the market and are or are not competitive.<p>That said, I'm rooting for them to be successful, flash is in a bad way at the moment with feature size being a hard limit on cell lifetimes.
From <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4126966" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4126966</a> I learned that HP's memristor claims are controversial within the research community:<p><a href="http://vixra.org/abs/1205.0004" rel="nofollow">http://vixra.org/abs/1205.0004</a><p><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/blaisemouttet/mythical-memristor" rel="nofollow">http://www.slideshare.net/blaisemouttet/mythical-memristor</a><p>Some of the controversy is about priority, which may not matter so much; I care less about whom I get massive on-chip non-volatile storage from than that I get it at all. But that too is under dispute (e.g. "Myth #3" in the second link above). So it's a little distressing to see signs of vaporware from HP at this point. I really want this!<p>Also, the OP links to a post (<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/09/hp_memristor_and_photons/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/09/hp_memristor_and_pho...</a>) in which Williams says something odd: "We're not going to make money off these chips. We are going to make money by building cool systems utilising these chips." If his memristor claims are true, the chips themselves could hardly be more of a game changer – worth billions to put it mildly.
> Historically, electrical circuits were crafted with three basic building blocks: the capacitor, the resistor, and the inductor. But in 1971, University of California at Berkeley professor Leon Chua predicted the existence of a fourth: the memristor, short for memory resistor.<p>> Then, in May of 2008, HP announced that it had actually built a memristor, thanks to HP Labs Fellow R. Stanley Williams and others working in the company’s research arm.<p>Here's a great presentation from R. Stanley Williams[1], via prior discussion at HN[2].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY&sns=em" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY&sns=em</a><p>[2] <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3088739" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3088739</a>
> “Our partner, Hynix, is a major producer of flash memory, and memristors will cannibalise its existing business by replacing some flash memory with a different technology,” he said. “So the way we time the introduction of memristors turns out to be important. There’s a lot more money being spent on understanding and modeling the market than on any of the research.”<p>Surely if they wait too long purely for profitable reasons the market will punish them by someone else beating them to it?
Aficionados of weird co-incidence might be interested to learn that the researcher who discovered the memristor, Leon Chua, also has a daughter who is rather famous for having written "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Chua" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Chua</a>). Leon Chua is also an enthusiast of Stephen Wolfram's NKS, and spoke at one of the early NKS conferences.
They should starting to bring out developer packages asap, because memory is not the only thing you can do with it as you can see from the presentations and papers. I find the stuff it can do BESIDES memory actually more interesting and really would like to get experimenting with it.
So then memristors remain "in the future". <i>sigh</i>. I was naiive enough to believe them a year ago when they said "it'll be on the market in 18 months". I was really looking forward to that being true and ditching RAM in six months.
I think memristors are a real contender for future devices; the darpa synapse reseaarch has shown that it's already a big backbone for future ai devices.
I wonder if the first uses of RRAM, when its still fairly expensive and low density, will be as a coalescing cache in front of big blocks of flash memory? Or maybe just for the page table.
“Development costs at least 10 times as much as research, and commercialization costs 10 times as much as development. So in the end, research — which we think is the most important part — is only 1 percent of the effort.”<p>This just means that it's easy to get something working in a lab but it's hard to make a product that you can mass produce. In non-voitile memory a flash replacement is always 2 years out, just like cold fusion is always 10 years out.