Scientists Create First Memristor: Missing Fourth Electronic Circuit Element

There's an interesting tradeoff between the size of the box, the number of bits, and the required detector. And, if you're going small enough, the charge of an electron.

1) People in that sector don't really understand why this is a big deal.

2) It looks like just another "Breakthrough" in hi-tech; which is to say, a regular every-day occurrence. The fact that all articles point to nothing coming to the market for at least five to ten years also means that finance people aren't interested in the tech yet.

Hilarious. I think that depending on the noise immunity properties they may increase storage density signifcantly, but it will be more along the lines of a sustaining rather than revolutionary product, in terms of impact. I doubt, due to imperfections in the manufacturing process, that we will ever be able to store a continuous analog signal with perfect fidelity. In fact, Shannon's law forbids it has to be sent along a channel, which it does.

Analog computing has been with us forever, we'll see if this makes it commercially viable.

Hilarious. I think that depending on the noise immunity properties they may increase storage density signifcantly, but it will be more along the lines of a sustaining rather than revolutionary product, in terms of impact. I doubt, due to imperfections in the manufacturing process, that we will ever be able to store a continuous analog signal with perfect fidelity. In fact, Shannon's law forbids that if it has to be sent along a channel, which it does.

Analog computing has been with us forever, we'll see if this makes it commercially viable for some applications. Good news, in any case.

As far as I can see, the most likely case is that you might wind up with a single, huge, fast chunk of memory replacing both your RAM and your hard disk. That should change things somewhat from the programmer's point of view.

RAM is nothing more than just a cache mechanism for slower storage devices, and as such it could have been made transparent from the programming perspective (roughly the same way as other caching devices - Cache Level 1 ... Cache Level N, CPU registers).

The reasons RAM is still directly programmable are probably historical rather than technical. There is clearly a tendency though in many modern dynamic languages to hide direct memory allocation from the programmer.

So, my first guess is, memristors won't affect much the world of garbage-collected dynamic languages - they are sort of ahead of time already.

There is an interesting perspective, however, if you look at the OS level.

Firstly, some part of the file system which is read-only - mostly code - will not be copied or "loaded" anymore, it will be read directly by the CPU from where it lies in the FS.

Another important change here would be that memory pointers will persist. It is difficult to speculate on the possible impact, but it may be huge. It may even give rise to new programming languages - with or without direct pointer manipulation, I don't know.

As for data files, my guess is that "open", "save" and other common verbs will be eliminated. Instead, we'll work directly on the file and the system will somehow keep the modification history (and here's where the analog nature of memristors might help, or maybe not).

"Flux is usually the integral of a vector quantity over a finite surface."

So, I don't think the author is clueless. The vector quantity in this case is the electric field.

Edit: although, from reading a little bit more about the Memristor, it appears that it actually relates the magnetic flux to the charge.

  d(phi) = Mdq