A physical memtransistor will be a lot faster than emulating it in software, but you'll also be limited by the original connections and design of the chip. Not as easy to reconfigure as writing new code.
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[0] https://web.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/index.html
the big idea here is that IF your base element (memristor crossbar here) is suitable for such rapidly reconfigurable bus architecture (which it seem like it is) then you can use it to synthesis a single neuron directly. which is a huge leap over the next best GPU/TPU based architecture based on instruction fetch-decode-execute model. based on what I have read few years ago you can have a 20M neurons simulated with memristors in about a cm2 die. that is human level integration density even if you totally ignore the vast difference in switching rate (100Hz vs 1+GHz).