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Comment by Tuna-Fish | Hacker News Reader

Even if the base circuit elements are made of memristors instead of transistors, the traces on top of them still need to be laid out in the traditional manner. So the fixed cost of bringing even a small memristor device to market is millions.

Memristors are not some magic stuff that suddenly makes FPGAs as efficient as ASICs, nor do they make then dramatically cheaper.

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I'm not talking about magic; that's why I would like to see some (even expensive) developer version (as this is how new tech these days usually starts right?) come from HP. HP has the millions I would imagine and they know/see the potential (even though a lot of investment needs to go in to harvest that potential).

What exactly do you want?

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.

Well, the interview with the scientist from HP clearly states software would have to written very differently to make full use of this technology. So I want to see how that works. You seem to know a lot more about it, so what am I missing?

Instead of real hardware, I wonder if a mock up virtual device acting as it's making use of memristors could work for experiments on how this could affect software.

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