
Six-State Memristor Opens Door to Weird Computing - kavalec
http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/memory/sixstate-memristor-opens-door-to-weird-computing
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tacon
Stan Williams of HP Labs gave a talk recently at Rice, his alma mater. He was
describing the "HP Machine" they are working on, with memristors at the bottom
of a hardware and software stack rearchitected from scratch. Don't look to be
able to buy any memristors from HP anytime soon. HP predicts that their own
internal demand, in producing the HP Machine, will consume all their memristor
production for years.

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grondilu
> Stan Williams of HP Labs gave a talk recently at Rice

Any link?

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tacon
Here is the abstract of the talk. There was a video made, but I don't see it
online yet.

[http://www.k2i.rice.edu/EventsList.aspx?EventRecord=23375](http://www.k2i.rice.edu/EventsList.aspx?EventRecord=23375)

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ehsanu1
Managed to find it here:
[https://mediacosmos.rice.edu/app/plugin/embed.aspx?ID=vVUTzF...](https://mediacosmos.rice.edu/app/plugin/embed.aspx?ID=vVUTzFCE006yZu3TF1sXKg&displayTitle=false&startTime=0&autoPlay=false&hideControls=false&showCaptions=false&width=420&height=236&destinationID=URka-
_E5-0-e4girH4pDPQ&contentID=vq2oQtAqPkeAqm5F6uSnqA&pageIndex=1&pageSize=10)

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cbennett
thanks very much for this! had been looking for some time for a quite recent
Williams talk

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ChuckMcM
Oh that is pretty clever. I wonder what the write time is. Even a reliable 6
level memory would be useful giving you four useful states (2 bits), a non-
initialized, and an initialized undef state.

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chm

        For example, the largest unsigned binary 64-bit ­integer—18,446,744,073,709,551,615—
        could be held in 20 bits instead of 64.
    

This should read "could be held in 20 digits instead of 64 bits."

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jlangenauer
If "bit" is a portmanteau of "binary digit", wouldn't the analogue in a
senary[1] number system be a "sit"?

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senary](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senary)

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FD3SA
This is an interesting implementation of the memristor, but I still think the
real breakthrough will be in the two state memristor [1]. Once memristor
fabrication technology is mature, we are going to see a massive paradigm shift
away from the Von Neumann architecture.

All the details are in the linked video by HP's Stan Williams. Definitely
worth a watch if you're interested in the future of computing

1\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY)
(start at 38m for future computing implications)

EDIT:

Another video [2], but a bit more in depth. Recommended if the material in the
first was a bit confusing as Stan was short on time to explain some of the
details.

2\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFdDPzcZwbs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFdDPzcZwbs)

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sliverstorm
he doesn't seem to talk about the end of the Von Neuman architecture. Explain
that part?

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FD3SA
Start here, around the 38 min mark:

[http://youtu.be/bKGhvKyjgLY?t=37m59s](http://youtu.be/bKGhvKyjgLY?t=37m59s)

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sliverstorm
yeah, still don't see where he talks about architecture. He explains how
memristors can be used for logic, but con Neuman is not implicitly wedded to
transistors.

Don't get me wrong, I think they will be useful.

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cbennett
Here is the paper for any one curious in a look at the actual configuration of
the nanowire device: thankfully there is no pay-gating
[http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn505139m](http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn505139m)

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ivanche
I found interesting that world's first mechanical computer, Charles Babbage's
"Analytical Machine" had a base-10 fixed point arithmetic [1], and we could
soon have base-10 RRAM...

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Engine)

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rpedela
Assuming they work out performance and other engineering issues, could this be
used to implement something like qubits?

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acjohnson55
There's nothing in the article that would make me think that this is the case.
A qubit is a fundamentally different concept, in which a computation can be
performed on all possible states simultaneously. This seems to just be getting
more states out of a single classical element.

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rasz_pl
so how is that any different from NAND MLC and TLC? I bet they already got it
patented with a cute "on a memristor" at the end of application title.

