I don't think we'll have any keeping up with Moore's Law. In 5 years memristor storage will be everywhere. IBM will develop memristor processors for the Blue Brain project.
Not since the inductor was discovered has there been such cause for rejoicing.
My guess is that people in this glorious new age will continue to be, by turns, noble, venal, kind, warlike, selfish, generous, stupid, wise, thoughtful and ignorant, and that life will go on much as it always has.
I find it hard to believe that this discovery/invention (as opposed to, say, the transistor, fission, the steam engine, the telegraph, quantum mechanics, et-bloody-cetera) is really going to alter the human experience for all time.
We will, however, have smaller iPods. And this is a cool discovery.
From a narrow, self-interested perspective, I wonder if this will end up having any impact on how computers look to the programmer. I'd guess not; I think this stuff will be used to make faster/smaller versions of what we already have, in much the same way the last 30 years of advances in processor design were used to make really fast IA instruction set chips. If I'm wrong, though, it'll be interesting learning how to program the things.
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).
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.
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.
I'm not being a smartass, I just really don't understand why we haven't seen financial implications of this find.
Edit In the interest of disclosure, I've bought some shares to put my money where my mind is.
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.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...,
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...,
And another company has a related patent based on the usage of a memristor:
Updated: Actually only the second one has molecules at the intersections, the other two seem to be more general.
Edit
I think this might be the correct one: http://www.google.com/patents?id=mWcGAAAAEBAJ
It's possible that the first or the third one you posted might be general enough to encompass the memristor system as implemented, but I don't think either of them is specifically related to the new let's-diffuse-ions-across-a-thin-semiconductor-film memristor idea.