Hacker News Reader

Comment by nyolfen | Hacker News Reader

> I've never understood why people don't get more excited about memristors.

personally, mostly because i've been seeing articles about how they're just about to totally upend computing for the last ten years

View on HN

I've noticed that overly excited articles are tend to be nonsense until they're finally true.

I know that sounds like tautological nonsense, but the trick comes down to predicting when these things will become real rather than if they become real. From my experience, if you want a good indication, look at price/performance trends for a particular technology. If that technology has no price/performance data, look at the price/performance data of its components or related technologies.

If you can't find price/performance data, then don't get too excited yet.

> I've noticed that overly excited articles are tend to be nonsense until they're finally true.

The funny thing is that if you reread Wired's article about Push, which they've been made fun of for ever since writing it, the only thing that hasn't come true is the technologies they predicted would power it. But other than that it's a perfect description of Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, etc.

https://www.wired.com/1997/03/ff-push/

Funny, but I was thinking pretty much the same thing about push a day or so back myself.

10 years? I've been seeing them hyped as the "next big thing" since the 90s. HP keeps pumping out press releases every so often.

How? The first memristor was created in 2008.

The concept goes back to at least '71

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1083337/

Correct on concept, but up until 2008 nobody produced one reliably.

You can find references and hints to them all the way back to maxwell's day. They tended to be regarded as anomalous circuits back then however.

The fact that nobody has produced a fusion generator, does not mean that the amount of articles claiming that fusion is 'just around the corner' is any less.

It took at least that long to go from the theorized device to the first prototype.

..."hyped as"...

Well, if they were 10 years away in 2008, that should mean the first 90% is done this year, then it'll be another 9 years for the remaining 10%? So 2026? ;-)

Pretty sure I first read about them in a PC World magazine I got at the airport on a family vacation in like 2003

As far as I know I submitted the first ever article about memristors to HN, which was this in 2008:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=177865

There was a world of media before HN, you know. Just saying.

I don't think he was implying otherwise.

HN has only been around since 2007

Ambiguous language. I thank what was being implied is that it was the first occurrence of that type of article on HN, not that the article was the first ever about memristers and was posted to HN.

Not really that relevant to the ongoing point of the age of memristor articles then.

It's been a dream since the term was invented in 1971. HP Lab's big announcement that they had cracked memristors and they were right around the corner was in 2008 (which is quite nearly a decade ago now).

Doubtful, the first purpose built memristor existed in 2008. Though to be honest we've seen them since the 1800's as oddities in certain electrical circuits.

They've been theorized since 1971 mathmatically but until fairly recently haven't been a thing.

It is the fourth fundamental circuit, give it a while before discounting it. And be happy you're alive when the fourth fundamental circuit was discovered and made real.

Feynman also ranted about how much processing within the memory would speed computing in the 80's. He challenged those "computer scientists" to figure it out :P

.... this lecture: http://cse.unl.edu/~seth/434/Web%20Links%20and%20Docs/Feynma...

That's how I heard of them referred to since at least the early 90's, as processor-in-memory. I didn't know memristor was referring to the same concept.

Very insightful post. Thanks for that.

I skimmed the paper and enjoyed the illustrations, and the photos at the end :).

So Memristors are about reversible gates instead of non-reversible NAND gates?

I think what he implied was that more reliable calculations would come from reversible gates, though they'd ultimately be slower. The speed being one of the main reasons they weren't used in processor design. One of the solutions for that problem was the parallel design that could compensate for the slowdown of individual calculations by the ability to run many at the same time, and of course the increased rate of transmission by performing the calculations right within the memory instead of the added latency of fetching and storing values every values and performing every calculation synchronously.

So I think it's more that memristors would be a solution that allows the use of reversible gates making for more reliable processors. If anybody else has any better insight, fire away.

I think maybe the relevant bit - kind of a job to find in 16 pages:

>. Another plan is to distribute very large numbers of very simple central processors all over the memory. Each one deals with just a small part of the memory and there is an elaborate system of interconnections between them. An example of such a machine is the Connection Machine made at M.I.T. It has 64,000 processors and a system of routing in which every 16 can talk to any other 16 and thus 4000 routing connection possibilities.

I still remember something like 25 years ago the revolution of clockless circuits published in SciAm..

Try 45 years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com