First Programmable Memristor Computer
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
A true memristor as envisioned by Chua would be a revolutionary device of extreme utility. If knownm has what they say they have, the company would be worth billions. But they’ve been around for years and their website looks like every other scammy snake oil site out there.
Hah, I just noticed, the founder and the CTO have no industry experience and I can’t find anyone who does connected to the company. They started this scam fresh out of college.
And more: Their "angel investor" and "chief administrative officer" is the founder's mother, but this is very carefully sidestepped in the bios. Every time I look closer, it's one more classic sign of a scam.
Who are their process engineers? Where is their fab? Are they contracting with a third party? Who? Will they vouch for the technology?
Ahahahaha, as it were:
"In January of 2018 AHaH Computing was proven feasible with Knowm SDC Memristors on the open-source Memristor Discovery platform. As of January 2019, Knowm SDC Memristors passed four years of shelf-life testing and have shipped to researcher in over forty countries."
The "Memristor Discovery Platform" was made by... Knowm. (in other words, "it works because I say so").
Are you sure this isn't a practical joke?
We've been here before. Companies make all sorts of microchips that do a lot, a little, or nothing at all, and many are counterfeit and outright frauds. When a small company in New Mexico with no experience tells you they're going to revolutionize computing, just walk away.
> When a small company in New Mexico with no experience tells you they're going to revolutionize computing, just walk away.
This is a perfect description for Microsoft in 1975, which was founded in New Mexico.
Any company that says "The revolution is here!" is suspect, but if they can't actually give you a device that brings major, practical, commercially important changes, it's probably bullshit.
Also your "ha no industry experience" is pretty laughable considering the entire Quantum Computing Industry is blossoming out of universities and PHDs. Musk had no Rocket ship industry experience, Zuckerberg had no social media industry experience, Paulmer Luckey had no hardware or entertainment industry experience, etc. I can go on forever.
Maybe instead of mocking someone elses work and slandering their name with barely a whiff of an idea of who they are and what they are doing you should engage in some sort of meaningful criticism or debate.
I'll not be responding or reading your reply. So feel free to do whatever with that knowledge. Just thought I should mention that this site is apparently supposed to be about hackers conversing in useful conversations and enlightening themselves. So maybe try to stick to that.
Also, reminder that even if someone manages to make a real memristor and everyone agrees it is a memristor, it may not end up being a big deal. They have some nice hypothetical properties, but they're not magic, and any widespread use would probably take decades.
What definitions of memristors would make them physically impossible?
What hypothetical benefits are so compelling about the physically possible definitions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor#Background
And I'm going to assume GP is basically referring to the first paragraph of the next session regarding definition and criticism:
According to the original 1971 definition, the memristor was the fourth fundamental circuit element, forming a non-linear relationship between electric charge and magnetic flux linkage. In 2011, Chua argued for a broader definition that included all 2-terminal non-volatile memory devices based on resistance switching.[2] Williams argued that MRAM, phase-change memory and ReRAM were memristor technologies.[21] Some researchers argued that biological structures such as blood[22] and skin[23][24] fit the definition. Others argued that the memory device under development by HP Labs and other forms of ReRAM were not memristors, but rather part of a broader class of variable-resistance systems,[25] and that a broader definition of memristor is a scientifically unjustifiable land grab that favored HP's memristor patents.[26]
In the 90s somebody at HP must have mentioned memristors in hearing range of their marketing department and suddenly HP was going to have a product to market in a few years.
Yeah. Never happened. Nobody's done it.
In theory, such a device could allow us to do things like build extremely low power non-volatile memory (a flash replacement, basically). A lot of marketing hype has talked about completely replacing computer RAM with non-volatile memristor-backed memory, but again, neither it nor anything like it has happened. But as it turns out, battery-backed DRAM covers a multitude of sins anyway.
The actual debate over physical possibility is because it's too low-power, to the point that an actual implementation might violate lower theoretical limits on the amount of energy required to change the state of a bit. In other words, it might violate the second law of thermodynamics, which is something of a problem.
[1] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/76097/what-a...
What does this even mean in a computer? How can you do a non-digital computation?
The real key feature of memristors is not the math or any of that stuff, it's that all that math is stable under power cycling and it take nearly no power to compute things. The article mentions that they preformed 188 GigaFlops with about 0.3W of power. The human brain is about 20W at about 1 ExaFlop (a VERY coarse estimate) for comparison.
This power savings opens up the doors for very good computation (ML stuff) on very tiny power sources.
[0] there are MANY ways to skin this cat, but here is a simple one: https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/wp-content/uploads/2013...
[1] https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1205-141021211518-conversion...