Why on earth was my title replaced? Sigh.
Revolutionary memristors purposely delayed to prevent cannibalization of flash
It's 100% accurate and more relevant.
Revolutionary memristors purposely delayed to prevent cannibalization of flash
It's 100% accurate and more relevant.
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.
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.