This is so big, it's tough to imagine our memristor based future. Please speculate wildly about humanity in the Memristor Age.
I don't think we'll have any keeping up with Moore's Law. In 5 years memristor storage will be everywhere. IBM will develop memristor processors for the Blue Brain project.
"This is so big, it's tough to imagine our memristor based future. Please speculate wildly about humanity in the Memristor Age."
Not since the inductor was discovered has there been such cause for rejoicing.
My guess is that people in this glorious new age will continue to be, by turns, noble, venal, kind, warlike, selfish, generous, stupid, wise, thoughtful and ignorant, and that life will go on much as it always has.
I find it hard to believe that this discovery/invention (as opposed to, say, the transistor, fission, the steam engine, the telegraph, quantum mechanics, et-bloody-cetera) is really going to alter the human experience for all time.
We will, however, have smaller iPods. And this is a cool discovery.
From a narrow, self-interested perspective, I wonder if this will end up having any impact on how computers look to the programmer. I'd guess not; I think this stuff will be used to make faster/smaller versions of what we already have, in much the same way the last 30 years of advances in processor design were used to make really fast IA instruction set chips. If I'm wrong, though, it'll be interesting learning how to program the things.
I wonder if this will end up having any impact on how computers look to the programmer.
RAM is nothing more than just a cache mechanism for slower storage devices, and as such it could have been made transparent from the programming perspective (roughly the same way as other caching devices - Cache Level 1 ... Cache Level N, CPU registers).
The reasons RAM is still directly programmable are probably historical rather than technical. There is clearly a tendency though in many modern dynamic languages to hide direct memory allocation from the programmer.
So, my first guess is, memristors won't affect much the world of garbage-collected dynamic languages - they are sort of ahead of time already.
There is an interesting perspective, however, if you look at the OS level.
Firstly, some part of the file system which is read-only - mostly code - will not be copied or "loaded" anymore, it will be read directly by the CPU from where it lies in the FS.
Another important change here would be that memory pointers will persist. It is difficult to speculate on the possible impact, but it may be huge. It may even give rise to new programming languages - with or without direct pointer manipulation, I don't know.
As for data files, my guess is that "open", "save" and other common verbs will be eliminated. Instead, we'll work directly on the file and the system will somehow keep the modification history (and here's where the analog nature of memristors might help, or maybe not).
Not since the inductor was discovered has there been such cause for rejoicing.
Hilarious. I think that depending on the noise immunity properties they may increase storage density signifcantly, but it will be more along the lines of a sustaining rather than revolutionary product, in terms of impact. I doubt, due to imperfections in the manufacturing process, that we will ever be able to store a continuous analog signal with perfect fidelity. In fact, Shannon's law forbids that if it has to be sent along a channel, which it does.
Analog computing has been with us forever, we'll see if this makes it commercially viable for some applications. Good news, in any case.
From a narrow, self-interested perspective, I wonder if this will end up having any impact on how computers look to the programmer.
As far as I can see, the most likely case is that you might wind up with a single, huge, fast chunk of memory replacing both your RAM and your hard disk. That should change things somewhat from the programmer's point of view.
Not since the inductor was discovered has there been such cause for rejoicing.
Hilarious. I think that depending on the noise immunity properties they may increase storage density signifcantly, but it will be more along the lines of a sustaining rather than revolutionary product, in terms of impact. I doubt, due to imperfections in the manufacturing process, that we will ever be able to store a continuous analog signal with perfect fidelity. In fact, Shannon's law forbids it has to be sent along a channel, which it does.
Analog computing has been with us forever, we'll see if this makes it commercially viable.
Okay, I took the time to do some asking around with some finance friends of mine. Their opinions were that:
1) People in that sector don't really understand why this is a big deal.
2) It looks like just another "Breakthrough" in hi-tech; which is to say, a regular every-day occurrence. The fact that all articles point to nothing coming to the market for at least five to ten years also means that finance people aren't interested in the tech yet.
Actually those seem to be related to a very different device which was in development in the same group -- an array of nanowires with single molecules at the intersections forming logical elements. Very cool, but very hard to fabricate, and not a memristor.
Updated: Actually only the second one has molecules at the intersections, the other two seem to be more general.
Eh, I must have been confused by the "pictures" posted of the memristor, because the patents describe the image that was getting shown in the articles. I'm not an EE by any stretch of the imagination, so I'd be inclined to take your word over mine.
Now I come to look at the image, you're right in that the new memristor architecture seems to a similar crossbar-style geometry similar to some of their previous inventions.
It's possible that the first or the third one you posted might be general enough to encompass the memristor system as implemented, but I don't think either of them is specifically related to the new let's-diffuse-ions-across-a-thin-semiconductor-film memristor idea.
I don't think we'll have any keeping up with Moore's Law. In 5 years memristor storage will be everywhere. IBM will develop memristor processors for the Blue Brain project.