

Get Ready For the Memristor Revolution - jaybol
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Foremski/?p=1309

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izendejas
Much better article: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=397335>

I really hope these make the hard-disk and RAM obsolote. The hard-disk of
course is the current bottle neck, so removing it entirely from the picture
with potentially smaller, and cheaper devices alone will lead to an insane
amount of innovation.

For example, the idea that we can move away from the von Neumann model and
have in-memory processing (so-to-speak) could lead to a revolution in computer
vision and other highly parallel, compute-intensive, pattern matching
applications.

For now, HP will begin to deploy these things in tiny, very sensitive sensors
that will lead to, potentially, more efficient discovery of oil:
<http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2009/oct-dec/cense.html>

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eru
I guess clunky hard-disks with all their moving parts will be around for some
time to come. Just because they have already been around for so long and
survived several other up-and-coming technologies.

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moultano
Important subject, but this article sucks.

 _Instead of just two states, on or off, as with transistors, memristors can
represent many states. This means we can create new types of computing models,
we can also create analog computers, which you don’t program, but you let them
learn. You can then replicate the learning to other memristor analog
computers.

\- We might be able to use memristors in a similar way to synapses in the
human brain._

_snort_

~~~
jsmcgd
What is wrong with the article?

~~~
arethuza
This bit is rather silly:

"This means we can create new types of computing models, we can also create
analog computers, which you don’t program, but you let them learn."

Analog computation is nothing new and has pretty much been superseded by
stored program digital computers - for very good reasons.

I used to knew am engineer who had used a hydraulic analog computer to solve
systems of differential equations that modeled fluid flow... :-)

~~~
DuncanIdaho
I'm not claiming to be knowledgeable, but isn't it true, that analog computers
are easy and fast to use for computations (sliding logarithmic ruler, self
regulating hydraulic systems,...). But notoriously hard to construct IF you're
looking for something multipurpose and programmable.

~~~
_delirium
It's mostly the "you don’t program, but you let them learn" part that's a bit
weird/inaccurate. You have to program analog computers, and don't get any
automatic learning built in. It's just a different kind of programming. Some
things, from a digital-programming perspective, are amazing freebies that
would require difficult programming on a digital computer. Other things, that
on a digital computer would be trivial, are frustratingly difficult to
implement. But it's still programming of a sort either way.

And it doesn't make a ton of difference these days anyway, because
"continuous" vs. "discrete, but with trillions of gradations" are
indistinguishable for a lot of problems, so you can simulate an analog
computer on a digital one, or vice versa, with reasonable accuracy.

