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For those of you who are unfamiliar with what a memristor is, as I was, HP has an easy-to-understand analogy on its FAQ page about memristors: "A common analogy for a resistor is a pipe that carries water. The water itself is analogous to electrical charge, the pressure at the input of the pipe is similar to voltage, and the rate of flow of the water through the pipe is like electrical current. Just as with an electr…
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It could reduce the amount of data a smartphone needs. I'd like to keep a copy of my local area in my google map and then have it check in once a week to look for changes.
A smartphone could have an onboard map today. It's a conscious choice by google to make it work the way it does. Look at TomTom or any other navigator (and possibly some smartphone apps too) that come with integrated maps. That service is just grafted on there, it's not a necessity. It's the google way of doing things.
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Plans are not products, but let's wait and see before we get all happy.
Yeah my thought too--I'll believe it when they actually release a product. It's like most research projects--initial results are great. Having it on the market means it really exists though...
http://www.research.ibm.com/research/gmr.html
I've been hearing for so long about the memristor revolution being just around the corner that I will simply wait until I can buy it before I get happy. It's cynical, for sure, but HP have been hyping this once too many for me.
I do think it is great that they're working on this as hard as they are and I think if it pays off HP will be worth more than Apple by the time they're done. A fundamental break-through of this magnitude will be worth a fortune the likes of which we can probably not even imagine.
"HP’s bet is the memristor, a nanoscale chip that Labs researchers must build and handle in full anticontamination clean-room suits." So... it's a chip.
See some of the other answers. The memristor is not a chip, but the 4th fundamental electrical component; the chip is a hybrid memory/storage chip using memristors (instead of platters or capacitors). Because of its nature it demands a pretty thorough reimagining of processing data.
I so much want this to be true, I can't wait for it. Not having a layered memory architecture means no VM, everything has be rethought from the filesystem down. On a related note: "Operating systems have not been taught what to do with all of this memory, and HP will have to get very creative." Anyone knows what this could possibly mean?
Well, you wouldn't have to save files. You could just use a data structure in main memory because it's non-volatile. But how would you share data between programs when there's no disk? And you could execute binaries directly from storage without "loading" them into memory first. But you'd have to keep an original copy somewhere in case it modifies itself as it runs.
The logical structure of a filesystem is still a useful abstraction (and has been decoupled from physical constraints for a long time now).
Just like IBM had at least a few interesting ideas to give Watson credibility, HP hopes its memristor work will give "The Machine" enough credibility that they won't get laughed out of the room once they parade it around the MSM.
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A smartphone could have an onboard map today. It's a conscious choice by google to make it work the way it does. Look at TomTom or any other navigator (and possibly some smartphone apps too) that come with integrated maps. That service is just grafted on there, it's not a necessity. It's the google way of doing things.
StreetView is a useful, if expensive to implement, addition to maps, and doesn't fit on a phone (yet)
I've been holding out from the smartphone revolution for quite a while now, but a phone that would do off-line navigation would be a good thing because that means one less thing to carry along.
I don't like having services forced upon me when a single download would suffice.
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You know a lot of programs that know how to use memristors?
All of them? It's just another type of non-volatile storage.
Memristors, the way they are hyped, promise to be orders of magnitude smaller, faster, cheaper AND less energy consuming than all of the other memories that exist. All at the same time. If time proves this all to be true, it can bring really groundbreaking changes to computing. And we all will be able to watch more funny cat videos, at a greater resolution.