I have a hard time seeing whether memristors are really going to be the future of all storage or whether it's just a fad. Can somebody who knows something about the topic explain this?
Memristors look extremely likely to be able to provide non-volatile storage with latency, access speeds, and density higher than existing DRAM and flash. They also look like they can be used to make FPGA-like devices which can approach the speed, power efficiency, and logic density of custom designed ASICs but with extremely fast reconfiguration speed. And those seem to be the less fascinating aspects of memristor technology.
The thing about memristors is that they could potentially have transistor-like speed at the microlevel, but they can hold data at much, much higher density without constant input of power.
Potentially memristors could lead to smartphones and tablets with the power of a server rack of today crammed into them, but also with improved battery life.
And that's one of the least revolutionary implications of memristor technology.
