
HP Memristors Will Reinvent Computer Memory "by 2014" - hornokplease
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/hp-memristors/
======
ChuckMcM
Seems an optimistic timeline to 'reinvent' memory. They have perhaps forgotten
about 'bubble memory' which was going to 'eliminate disks' in 1982.

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."

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.

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.

~~~
sp332
Bubble memory was doing just fine until a Nobel-winning physics breakthrough
allowed the existence of high-density hard drives. If memristors do as well as
bubble memory, there will have to be a serious fluke for it _not_ to replace
everything on the market.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_memory#Commercializatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_memory#Commercialization)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Ah thanks for the memories (I was at Intel when they rolled up the bubble
memory team). But if the Wikipedia page can be trusted, its a good example of
the timeline of a disruptive technology. So 10 years from first devices to a
chance to really disrupt everything. That would make 2018 the year to watch
for memristor memory.

~~~
ThomPete
Unless progress is accelerating no?

~~~
ChuckMcM
It always feels like progress is accelerating but it is remarkably stubborn.

------
gruseom
From <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4126966> I learned that HP's
memristor claims are controversial within the research community:

<http://vixra.org/abs/1205.0004>

<http://www.slideshare.net/blaisemouttet/mythical-memristor>

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!

Also, the OP links to a post
([http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/09/hp_memristor_and_pho...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/09/hp_memristor_and_photons/))
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.

------
kbd
> 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.

> 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.

Here's a great presentation from R. Stanley Williams[1], via prior discussion
at HN[2].

[1]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY&sns=em](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY&sns=em)

[2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3088739>

~~~
loup-vaillant
What I take from this presentation is much, much more than lots of memory.
Apparently, these things can also do processing, like an FPGA. The result
would be a whole system on a chip, only the design is almost entirely pushed
up at the "software" level.

To me, that's even more game changing than a mere petabyte on a square inch.
"Specialized" hardware is made easy. Complete re-purposing becomes possible.
Most hardware compatibility issues just go away. And of course, it will be
much, much easier to experiment with novel and totally crazy architectures.

Oh, and they say it can re-configure itself on the fly, very rapidly. So, it's
not just easy innovations on hardware. It's _metamorph_ hardware. Imagine for
instance code that compiles down to _logic gates_ , instead of very high level
assembly code, possibly _on the fly_. Or, re-allocating hardware resources by
the second, depending on your needs.

~~~
gruseom
It's an exhilarating vision, because it would get a whole lot of accidental
limitations out of our way and allow us to build the essence of a design. A
lot of complexity is due to the impedance mismatch between what goes on at the
lowest level vs. the highest. To be able to design the machine itself as part
of the system would be a huge breakthrough – the sort of thing that, if it
happens, people may look back and wonder how anybody did anything before.

I get excited thinking about it. Unfortunately, we still don't have any
evidence that it's real. Read carefully, the article rather suggests the
opposite.

------
joshuahedlund
> “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.”

Surely if they wait too long purely for profitable reasons the market will
punish them by someone else beating them to it?

~~~
pillock
That passage leapt out at me too. In my simplistic geek mind this is totally
arse-about-face, like the tail wagging the dog. Are these companies more
interested in money than what they're actually doing?

But to answer your point: Patents.

~~~
zokier
> Are these companies more interested in money than what they're actually
> doing?

Their [HP] interest in what they're actually doing is demonstrated in their
investment in research that has enabled memristors. Commercialization, what
the quote was about, is obviously more about money. Money that eventually ends
up funding more research like this.

~~~
pillock
Of course you're right, but surely there's a balance to be found between
delaying the launch of this product vs. maximizing profits. If the company
involved is more interested in money they'll tend to err towards delaying
release, if they're more interested in the impact of their product they'll
tend to release sooner. Clearly, at a societal level, we'd prefer to have this
product sooner, so we have to constantly question the leverage that patents
afford large corporations and question their methods and motives.

------
taliesinb
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"
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Chua>). Leon Chua is also an enthusiast of
Stephen Wolfram's NKS, and spoke at one of the early NKS conferences.

~~~
SiVal
I read her book, which talks a lot about him, but I wouldn't have made the
connection if you hadn't pointed it out. Thanks.

------
tluyben2
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.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
Even if the base circuit elements are made of memristors instead of
transistors, the traces on top of them still need to be laid out in the
traditional manner. So the fixed cost of bringing even a small memristor
device to market is millions.

Memristors are not some magic stuff that suddenly makes FPGAs as efficient as
ASICs, nor do they make then dramatically cheaper.

~~~
tluyben2
I'm not talking about magic; that's why I would like to see some (even
expensive) developer version (as this is how new tech these days usually
starts right?) come from HP. HP has the millions I would imagine and they
know/see the potential (even though a lot of investment needs to go in to
harvest that potential).

~~~
Tuna-Fish
What exactly do you want?

I really have no idea what you even mean with a "developer version".
Memristors are just circuit elements. They are laid out in the billions on a
wafer and connected together with copper interconnects -- just like normal
transistors or the floating gate ones used by flash. They could give devs
early memory devices or something that uses memristors for logic, but other
than having the word memristor on the top, they would not differ from similar
devices built out of transistors and silicon.

~~~
tluyben2
Well, the interview with the scientist from HP clearly states software would
have to written very differently to make full use of this technology. So I
want to see how that works. You seem to know a lot more about it, so what am I
missing?

------
freehunter
So then memristors remain "in the future". _sigh_. 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.

~~~
Zenst
It may be 18 months in the RAM world but in memresistor world it is as long as
you like and still holding the 18 months value :).

That all said you are right and sadly come 2014 it will still not be available
for your PC to replace your RAM as it will take that long again to define a
standard and then that time again to have chipsets that support said standard.

So for a consumer PC, i'd say 2017 is when you can look at replacing your RAM
and by that time PC's will probably be reduced to devices were you can't
change the RAM and as such you wont know what you have got inside. But who
knows for sure and if they do then they would proabably get done for insider
share dealing just by telling people.

Only think we know for sure is the here and now and that any dat that has no
product release date set in stone is a date that has not had the engineering
factor of x2 and is a marketing factor of x.5. IE Engineers double the amount
of time it will realy take and markting will half the amount of time it will
realy take. Even then Engineers thesedays need to realy use x3.

Still - once we see a prototype working in a form factor we can identify with
and running windows or a comercial OS of any form, then and only then can we
feel that it will be available within 2 years. Anything else is pure marketing
by people who will be working elsewere in years time.

Though I would love to be proved wrong on this, truely.

~~~
MichaelApproved

      "it will still not be available for your PC to replace your RAM"
    

RAM? I thought this was a replacement for HDD and SSDs.

~~~
freehunter
You're right, I had my techs backwards. I thought they were targeting RAM
first, then flash second. It's actually the other way around. Flash was
supposed to be dead next year, DRAM in 2014, and SRAM in 2015 (or somewhere
around there).

[http://www.dailytech.com/HP+to+Deploy+Memristor+Powered+SSD+...](http://www.dailytech.com/HP+to+Deploy+Memristor+Powered+SSD+Replacement+Within+18+Months/article22963.htm)

~~~
MichaelApproved
Gotcha. I didn't even know they were targeting RAM at all. Can't wait until
storage gets cheaper and faster. IO is the worst part of the cloud and this
improvement could make working with a cloud computer much better.

~~~
watmough
Quality 32 GB flash drives are $20 on Amazon.

mRAM is going to have to work hard to keep up.

------
pixie_
"There’s a lot more money being spent on understanding and modeling the market
than on any of the research.” - what the shit

~~~
mattdeboard
I'm more surprised at how surprised so many people seem to be at this. This
isn't a college student building a music-sharing app here. This is a huge
corporation preparing to deliver disruptive technology. Naturally they're
doing enormous amounts of market research.

~~~
ricardobeat
But it doesn't make any sense. Why not spend those enormous amounts in
actually producing and shipping it before anyone else does? Market research is
sunk cost and doesn't prevent failure.

~~~
nl
_Why not spend those enormous amounts in actually producing and shipping it
before anyone else does?_

Because you might be able to make more money with a slow introduction rather
than a fast one. Restricting supply means you don't cannibalize the existing
flash memory market, and can probably still make huge profits from people who
must have the best possible performance.

Also, over-investment in production facilities is a huge risk.

------
batgaijin
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.

------
hosh
I'd like to see neural nets built out of these.

------
Symmetry
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.

------
pbharrin
“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.”

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.

~~~
tsotha
That was my take, too. I've been hearing about commercial memristors for at
least a couple decades now, and they're forever on the cusp of showing up on
my desktop.

~~~
nnethercote
Nobody even built a memristor until 2008. I think you're remembering wrongly.

~~~
tsotha
That didn't stop them from claiming it would be on my desktop.

