HP plans to release first memristor, alternative to flash and SSDs in 18 months

[uniclaude]

This article is mostly made of quotes from an EEtimes article[1], adds no information or value to it, and is (to me at least) less readable.

[1]:http://eetimes.com/electronics-news/4229171/HP-Hynix-to-laun...

[hornokplease]

EE Times article submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3080963

[pjscott]

The really exciting part here, to me, is the idea of fabricating large amounts of nonvolatile memory on top of a CPU. Modern processors already spend a huge amount of their time waiting on memory, and a great amount of power trying to hide that memory latency. If these guys can lower memory latency dramatically -- and it looks like they can -- computers would get a lot faster.

[TheEzEzz]

This would be a huge boon for scientific computing. The data is often huge, but all of it must be constantly pushed through the CPU every iteration.

[plasma]

Watch HP research's Stanley Williams describe the memristor and what they are working towards in more detail on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY&sns=em

[TheEzEzz]

From the video:

"So, I mean, we're all of a sudden talking petabits of memory in a square centimeter device. What can you do with that? Interesting to think about."

[speleding]

I watched the whole 47 minutes of that talk on youtube, and it is actually really good. I have no qualifications in this field, but the talk is full of challenging ideas. You can skip reading the article.

[bluehavana]

The no more hard drive and persistent ram thing should be really interesting. Completely change how we do things.

Also, application specific processing... writing instruction sets for each application will be really interesting. Cell processing et al will be a thing of the past.

[lordmatty]

Great to see some positive press on HP. Hope HP can innovate their way out of the current slump.

[calebmpeterson]

So how would this affect what languages we use? How different data structures perform? etc. Will this amplify the end of the free lunch?

I'm especially curious how Rich Hickey's approach to state, time, and identity in a functional language fit in?

[rbanffy]

Here we have HP on the verge of profoundly transforming our industry and a CEO (who should be aware of this) wanting to turn the company into an SAP, because that's the future...

I hope Meg Whitman does better than Leo Apotheker. Shouldn't be hard.

[vnchr]

But will Meg take it in the right direction either? Her experience is consumer-facing... I hope there is an empowered VP or 2 who will make that initiative a success.

[bane]

Enlarge the data bus and...are we finally finding a way out of the von Neuman architecture?

[palish]

Is the Von Neumann architecture related to the data bus?

[TheEzEzz]

What are the implications for back end development? Will this greatly reduce server complexity (need for redundancy)? Could AWS just give you a machine in the cloud, and you wouldn't need to worry about databases and database backups and so on, you could just keep all your data locally in natural data structures?

[ericfrenkiel]

This would not necessarily affect back end development as you would still want high availability for the application by using an active-active setup across two availability zones in EC2.

With regard to your question on data structures, yes - they would have to change. MySQL and most other databases use b-trees since they were meant to live on disk. Just running MySQL on memsistor-backed storage would result in a considerable waste of CPU and storage capacity (b-trees are not very compact).

Running a database like MemSQL on memsistors would make the most sense since it uses data structures meant for DRAM.

[sliverstorm]

Not if they continue cutting their hardware divisions, it won't.

[dmix]

> Asked about the competition, Williams said: "Samsung has An even larger group working on this than we do."

As a consumer, I'm indifferent to who does it. As long as it gets out.

[aheilbut]

Whatever happened with Nantero?

[rsanchez1]

A memristor TouchPad would've been really hot.

I wonder how these theoretical projects will survive in an HP that is only concerned with how much profit each project makes to appease shareholders...

[nwatson]

The bad side-effects of this memory technology: you can't just power-off your computer to hide your current activity; decrypted passwords in memory still will be readable after shutoff.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

This is silly. Just because memory is non volatile storage doesn't mean the OS can't do reasonable things like clearing out some state as it goes to sleep.

[jeroen]

The article mentions both 18 months and summer 2013. That's not entirely consistent.

[themgt]

The specific quote was "We’re planning to put a replacement chip on the market to go up against flash within a year and a half"

and "We have a lot of big plans for it and we're working with Hynix Semiconductor to launch a replacement for flash in the summer of 2013 and also to address the solid-state drive market"

June 2013 is twenty months away, so "a year and a half" is a very reasonable approximation, which it looks like the article writers then approximated again as "18 months"

[corin_]

It's an estimate not an exact length of time. 18 months takes us to April 2013, so maybe they rounded April into "summer" or maybe they rounded 20 months to the nearest .5 of a year. Or maybe they class April as summer anyway.

It's not like those two times are way different.

[dhughes]

I doubt HP itself will exist in 18 months.

[viraptor]

It won't disappear. It could be split, close some sites, change leadership again, etc. but it won't simply cease to exist. The existing infrastructure itself is worth too much.

[DasIch]

Even if HP doesn't the technology for this will probably survive.

[bvi]

Hyperbole much?