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Comment by achille | Hacker News Reader

I encourage folks to watch this tech talk by HP Research Labs on the discovery of the memristor and implementation details. It goes into the gory technical details, from the low level physics to the construction of the gates, the truth tables, and the high level computation possibilities once chips are assembled in a crossbar package.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY

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Thanks very much for sharing this video. Despite having a background in electrical engineering and device physics, I've never really understood what a memristor was until watching this.

Any idea if their materials have changed? He speaks of Platinum and Titanium Dioxide as the materials they are using. Even discounting the cost of spinning up the necessary fabrication facilities, I would think such materials would keep the costs prohibitive for mass adoption.

In the nano scale I would imagine that the material cost is not the biggest issue

Platinum has a long history in industrial applications, often in surprising quantities. There's got to be a few orders of magnitude more of it in a catalytic converter than you would want on a chip die.

Titanium dioxide is better known as white paint pigment. Or sunscreen. People smear it on their skin in large quantities. It's not what you'd call scarce.

Thanks for the video! It should be the first comment for this thread. I... retweeted it :)

If I understand this right (I'm not an electrical engineer) a hypothetical memristor-based computer would not need discrete RAM and disk storage nor would it have a fixed processing power. Rather, the chip of memristors would simultaneously be acting as the CPU and as non-volatile primary memory with the speed and efficiency of DRAM (or better). Additionally, the number of memristors dedicated to computation vs. storage could be changed in real time on a live system.

This absolutely blows my mind.

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