Memristors' one-year delay will hit IT in the wallet
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
"As with many other ground-breaking technologies being developed at HP Labs, HP has not yet committed to a specific product roadmap for memristor-based products,"
Let me also say that I worked in the non-volatile memory business for seven years. Any organization that can scale better than its competitors will do so, unless they don't like making money. End of story. If HP and Hynix are not ramping to high volume, it's because they are not ready, not some stupid conspiracy theory that they want to stagnate the development of cloud-buzzword "technology".
The semiconductor industry is brutal in general. Selling to consumers is worse, but the worst by far is the part that sells any type of memory. Forget the conspiracy theories. This space is full of dead companies. Someone will eat you.
Really? Because there have been all kinds of price-fixing scandals and accusations for the last 2 decades... Price fixing does not sound very cut-throat to me...
Anyway, I want to explain why the DRAM world is brutal:
Here is the DRAM top 10 from 2006: http://i.cmpnet.com/eetimes/seminews/2007/chart1_020107.gif
And today the state is as follows: http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/david-manners-semicon...
Samsung: Eating everyone Hynix: Almost breaking even Qimonda: Dead Micron: Making money Elpida: Bankrupt Nanya: Losing more money than it makes Powerchip: Barely alive with 0.1% market share ProMos: Has sold its fabs, soon to be dead Etron: Alive, but with less that 0.1% market share and 15 cent loss per dollar sold. Winbond: Now only in specialty DRAM
So, Samsung and Micron are doing well, Hynix is barely OK and the rest are sunk. Yes, I believe that the DRAM competition is fierce and brutal.
Then I'd be curious to hear what you know/believe about memristors in general. To me they sound super exciting but there have been dismaying indications of vaporware (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4231367) and this latest postponement is consistent with that.
"The technology of the future will always be the technology of the future."
Just like cold fusion has been 5 years out for a long time. I know that is cynical, but the truth is flash keeps scaling and the new technologies are not cost effective compared with silicon flash.
evolution > revolution
The second link did a good job of summarizing the technologies that existing companies are pursuing. Most of these companies would like to have a two terminal element (resistor) over a three terminal element (transistor) if they could. It requires less space. When one of them finds a way to make it cheaper than flash you will see it on the market.
Revolutionary memristors purposely delayed to prevent cannibalization of flash
It's 100% accurate and more relevant.
What's the advantage of memristor-based storage, exactly?
If it's cheaper to make, then sell storage at a price that undercuts the competition but still makes a better profi.
If it's more reliable, then sell storage at a higher price with a better warranty.
There's no sensible scenario where memristors are ready to go but they don't want to sell any memristor products yet because it will hurt existing sales. Either they can make a better product, or they can't, and if they can't make a better product then the stuff simply isn't ready.
1) products sitting in store fronts and retail, that will be unsold if they announce something new.
2) Investments (in the billions) they have made for flash production. You don't just kill all the money you have invested to build a flash plant because there's a new better technology. Not if you can delay the introduction of said technology until those costs are absorbed, and the investments have paid for themselves.
3) materials they have ordered for flash production. Volume deals to manufactures for metals and the like can run not just one year ahead but several.
Selling the old stuff for a while is not even about price-fixing, if you think at this level, it's something natural that benefits all companies involved.
They all have: factory stock, retail stock, investments in flash technology and volume orders on materials to absorb before making the jump.
The sunk cost fallacy is continuing to put money into something explicitly because you're counting the previously sunk costs instead of justifying it by "the remainder to be spent < the expected return value." In this case, that's not the calculation that's being made at all.
Anyway, still enjoyed your comment :)
That's nothing like the "sunk cost fallacy". For one, in the sunk cost fallacy you cannot get your "sunk costs" back.
But those companies CAN (and will), sell their old flash tech stock.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/tha-amazing-memristor-bey...
They are probably delaying to get their profit out of existing investments in tool and die for their factories, as well as high inventories.
While all the manufactures are likely not in cahoots, it's probably like the airline industry where they look to the left and right and nod at each other and change fees right after each other.
Also notable how hard drive prices have not dropped even though supply is completely back to normal.
If those are reasy HP and partners can sell them at a premium.
For example, pricing memristor based drives exceedingly high will still likely put them well within the price range of ultra high-end flash based enterprise level drives (such as card based multi-terabyte SLC based drives), and so will still result in a canibalization of flash sales.
It's not about existing sales, it's about stock. If you have built a lot of stock of traditional devices (including materials and infrastructure for manufacture) while waiting for memsistor tech to be ready for prime time, you want to sell it first before you put out the new products in the market.
But surely, competitors will jump right in, right? Unfortunately, there are that many players. Similarly, they can't "undercut the competition" because there is no competition, just a few players that "understand" each other.
Storage/memory manufacturers have had a few price-fixing scandals over the years.
They keep a year of sales in inventory? That's a lot of money to have tied up.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/mo...
http://www.neurdon.com/category/synapse/
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4088605/Memristor-em...
And that new architectures would be required is only interesting if you're a breathless industry press reporter. New architectures are required all the damn time for all sorts of things. Intel, AMD, and nVidia all pump them out on a yearly frequency, give or take a bit depending. Flash drives, even without memristors, are going to rearchitect "the cloud" in the next couple of years. Architectures flow like water in this industry.
No one knows what the architecture of the first AI will look like. However, our current architectures have a big problem (for creating AI) in that they have a very clean separation between data and code. Code is run in the CPU and alters data on RAM and disk. Brains don't work this way -- there is no separation between data and code. For this reason I think memristors -- while not a silver bullet -- might represent a step in the right direction.
That's a security measure, rather than a fundamental property of transistors. We had to add that property to our architectures.
Simulating Hebbian learning isn't that difficult with transistors and conventional computation, so you don't get that big an advantage right now. If we were brushing up against the fundamental limits then it would matter, but we're a ways away from that yet.
You should expect to be able to purchase something (for more than the equivalent flash package would cost you) in 2015-2016. If they play out the way they should, the price/performance slope should cross over with flash around 2017-2018.
These new technologies usually take about 10 years to come online at volume. No conspiracy required.
However, I think there may be other reasons. Maybe they haven't worked out the connection architecture properly?
Edit: whoops, mtgx says Samsung is also in this space, so it sounds like patents can't be an obstacle, or at least until the suing starts.
So let's speculate
1 - They delayed this because of manufacturing problems and want to save face
2- They really are that stupid and gave a competitor a 1 year head start (or they made a Gentleman's Agreement - but it wouldn't prevent even another competitor getting in)
In short, this is extremely risky.
I agree a purposeful delay in order to try and squeeze some drops out of existing stock / sunk costs would be risky, and likely stupid. Clearly no corporation has ever made short-sighted, stupid decisions like that before so this would totally be a first :)
It seems like HP still hasn't been issued patents for it (at least by my googling) so I guess they are happy to just sit on their tech.
Also, Memristors are already being actively used for military technology, most notable the SyNAPSE project.
While many in these comments are touting "double storage & reliability for the same price", that would be for raw manufacturing costs, not including all the R&D money and the cost of fabrication plants that must be built or retooled. It is highly unlikely consumers will see those benefits anytime soon.
Also potential power savings.
A year is a huge deal if someone was planning on spending a million on a datacenter to make it use SSD for database, etc.
Seems like a lot of people in this discussion failed Econ 101.
Reminds me of Eastman Kodak circa 1975 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Kodak#Shift_to_digital.
That said, this is pretty weak evidence of collusion.
The headline is interesting because it's stating the obvious, standard business practice but possibly they have hit on the only way to glam up the incredibly boring story of 'product will be delayed by 12 months'.
Oh well, I guess Samsung will take the lead in that market, too, then, since I think they were the other main company working on memristors.
The article is B.S. If the release of this technology will replace all RAM, Flash memory, and other memory storage technologies as the author expects, they wouldn't need to delay it.
And lastly, if you believe the article, it says it's not in HP's control anyways. It's the manufacture partner Hynix fault.
And a LOL for misunderstanding his point.
He said that "this is why you don't see MUCH innovation from the big companies", not "why you don't see ANY" innovation.
And he used Apple precisely as a _counter_example_ to that lack of innovation, saying that what HP did would be like a hypothetical Apple saying they won't release the iPad because that would cannibalise iPhone sales.
I would even root for Samsung on this (also because it just finished my laundry).
If you're the only one on the market with memristors the margin is determined by whatever the market will bear, and if they're really that much better than existing technologies it will be much larger.
None of this conspiracy stuff makes any sense. They're delaying a year because they can't manufacture the product.
50 cents per GB now and falling.