HP Memristors Will Reinvent Computer Memory "by 2014"
wired.com
wired.com
From the article : "As reported by The Register, at a recent conference in Oxnard, California, HP’s Stan Williams said that commercial memristor hardware will be available by the end of 2014 at the earliest."
So basically we'll get to see real devices perhaps at the end of 2014 (I'm guessing closer to 2017 but we'll see) And we need a couple of years of building/using/repairing them before we see wide spread design wins, then another year before 'memristor' enabled devices hit the market and are or are not competitive.
That said, I'm rooting for them to be successful, flash is in a bad way at the moment with feature size being a hard limit on cell lifetimes.
http://vixra.org/abs/1205.0004
http://www.slideshare.net/blaisemouttet/mythical-memristor
Some of the controversy is about priority, which may not matter so much; I care less about whom I get massive on-chip non-volatile storage from than that I get it at all. But that too is under dispute (e.g. "Myth #3" in the second link above). So it's a little distressing to see signs of vaporware from HP at this point. I really want this!
Also, the OP links to a post (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/09/hp_memristor_and_pho...) in which Williams says something odd: "We're not going to make money off these chips. We are going to make money by building cool systems utilising these chips." If his memristor claims are true, the chips themselves could hardly be more of a game changer – worth billions to put it mildly.
> Then, in May of 2008, HP announced that it had actually built a memristor, thanks to HP Labs Fellow R. Stanley Williams and others working in the company’s research arm.
Here's a great presentation from R. Stanley Williams[1], via prior discussion at HN[2].
To me, that's even more game changing than a mere petabyte on a square inch. "Specialized" hardware is made easy. Complete re-purposing becomes possible. Most hardware compatibility issues just go away. And of course, it will be much, much easier to experiment with novel and totally crazy architectures.
Oh, and they say it can re-configure itself on the fly, very rapidly. So, it's not just easy innovations on hardware. It's metamorph hardware. Imagine for instance code that compiles down to logic gates, instead of very high level assembly code, possibly on the fly. Or, re-allocating hardware resources by the second, depending on your needs.
I get excited thinking about it. Unfortunately, we still don't have any evidence that it's real. Read carefully, the article rather suggests the opposite.
Surely if they wait too long purely for profitable reasons the market will punish them by someone else beating them to it?
But to answer your point: Patents.
Their [HP] interest in what they're actually doing is demonstrated in their investment in research that has enabled memristors. Commercialization, what the quote was about, is obviously more about money. Money that eventually ends up funding more research like this.
I think that statement about spending more (time or money?) studying the market than doing research is pretty sad.
Memristors are not some magic stuff that suddenly makes FPGAs as efficient as ASICs, nor do they make then dramatically cheaper.
I really have no idea what you even mean with a "developer version". Memristors are just circuit elements. They are laid out in the billions on a wafer and connected together with copper interconnects -- just like normal transistors or the floating gate ones used by flash. They could give devs early memory devices or something that uses memristors for logic, but other than having the word memristor on the top, they would not differ from similar devices built out of transistors and silicon.
That all said you are right and sadly come 2014 it will still not be available for your PC to replace your RAM as it will take that long again to define a standard and then that time again to have chipsets that support said standard.
So for a consumer PC, i'd say 2017 is when you can look at replacing your RAM and by that time PC's will probably be reduced to devices were you can't change the RAM and as such you wont know what you have got inside. But who knows for sure and if they do then they would proabably get done for insider share dealing just by telling people.
Only think we know for sure is the here and now and that any dat that has no product release date set in stone is a date that has not had the engineering factor of x2 and is a marketing factor of x.5. IE Engineers double the amount of time it will realy take and markting will half the amount of time it will realy take. Even then Engineers thesedays need to realy use x3.
Still - once we see a prototype working in a form factor we can identify with and running windows or a comercial OS of any form, then and only then can we feel that it will be available within 2 years. Anything else is pure marketing by people who will be working elsewere in years time.
Though I would love to be proved wrong on this, truely.
"it will still not be available for your PC to replace your RAM"
http://www.dailytech.com/HP+to+Deploy+Memristor+Powered+SSD+...
mRAM is going to have to work hard to keep up.
Because you might be able to make more money with a slow introduction rather than a fast one. Restricting supply means you don't cannibalize the existing flash memory market, and can probably still make huge profits from people who must have the best possible performance.
Also, over-investment in production facilities is a huge risk.
Does this pass a sanity test? What they're talking about would be the biggest breakthrough in computing in a generation. The question is not whether there's a market for it. The question is whether it works.
Edit: "the concept of a memristor, that of a large amount of small devices storing chunks of a larger piece of memory" <-- this is not the concept of a memristor. Not even close.
Hopefully it's something like this: If it works, let's sell it, then we can use some money to investigate how does it work and how we can improve it.
This just means that it's easy to get something working in a lab but it's hard to make a product that you can mass produce. In non-voitile memory a flash replacement is always 2 years out, just like cold fusion is always 10 years out.