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Comment by pbharrin | Hacker News Reader

This is a stupid article. The author makes the assumption that HP and Hynix COULD ramp to high volume production, however it is clear from HP's statement that this is not true:

"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".

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Ah, a breath of fresh sanity from someone who knows the industry. That is very welcome, thank you.

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.

>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.

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...

The only DRAM price fixing scandal that I know of is the one from 1998 to 2002 which gave the involved parties litigation on their backs up until 2010. If you know of any others, please let me know. Google did not turn up anything else.

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.

I worked in the non-volatile memory business for seven years.

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.

I do not have enough information to say what exactly is the problem with HP's memristor. The axiom of technology development in NVM is:

"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.

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