Memristors, that is. If you're interested in electronics at all, this is something you'll want to keep an eye on. I first heard about them in 2007, but didn't get too excited at that time – we've seen too many such claims of new “fundamentals” and seemingly miraculous new capabilities that ended up being just so much hogwash. But memristors are following the same pattern that any new technology development does: replicable results, multiple people working on it, and increasingly impressive results from labs.
In other words, it's starting to look like the real deal. And it has the potential to foment much change in electronics – most especially with storage. Single chips fabricated with conventional semiconductor techniques, with the storage capacity of hundreds of today's disk drives, archival quality storage lifetime, and nanosecond write speeds. If that ain't miraculous storage, I don't know what is.
The “new fundamental” bit with a memristor is that it represents the fourth fundamental electronic component. The other three (resistor, capacitor, and inductor) have been known for 200 years or so; the memristor would be the only component ever added to that list. In the 1960s a theoretical physicist predicted that memristors should exist, based on the symmetry of the mathematics used to describe the other three components. Looks like they really do exist, and (more importantly) are actually producable...
With that kind of memory, remembering its state, but fast enough to replace normal system memory, and with capacity to replace the storage drives, you would never have to boot up. Your system could just always operate out of memory "more or less like a RAM disk" but never lose its state so there is no need to load everything up.
ReplyDeleteI still remember when hard disks were slow enough that we used RAM disks to get better performance and would debate the trade-off between a disk cache and the RAM disk. In fact, I remember that you had a setup where it took you quite awhile to boot because you had a lot that would immediately start loading into the RAM disk at boot time. But then you could work much faster... except with the occasional loss because somebody forgot to save to persistent storage. Oops.