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> Historically, electrical circuits were crafted with three basic building blocks: the capacitor, the resistor, and the inductor. But in 1971, University of Cal

by kbd 14y ago

> Historically, electrical circuits were crafted with three basic building blocks: the capacitor, the resistor, and the inductor. But in 1971, University of California at Berkeley professor Leon Chua predicted the existence of a fourth: the memristor, short for memory resistor. > Then, in May of 2008, HP announced that it had actually built a memristor, thanks to HP Labs Fellow R. Stanley Williams and others working in the company’s research arm. Here's a great presentation from R. Stanley Williams[1], via prior discussion at HN[2]. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY&sns=em http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY&sns=em [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3088739 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3088739

loup-vaillant 14y ago
What I take from this presentation is much, much more than lots of memory. Apparently, these things can also do processing, like an FPGA. The result would be a whole system on a chip, only the design is almost entirely pushed up at the "software" level. To me, that's even more game changing than a mere petabyte on a square inch. "Specialized" hardware is made easy. Complete re-purposing becomes possible. Most hardware compatibility issues just go away. And of course, it will be much, much easier to experiment with novel and totally crazy architectures. Oh, and they say it can re-configure itself on the fly, very rapidly. So, it's not just easy innovations on hardware. It's metamorph hardware. Imagine for instance code that compiles down to logic gates, instead of very high level assembly code, possibly on the fly. Or, re-allocating hardware resources by the second, depending on your needs.
- gruseom 14y ago
  It's an exhilarating vision, because it would get a whole lot of accidental limitations out of our way and allow us to build the essence of a design. A lot of complexity is due to the impedance mismatch between what goes on at the lowest level vs. the highest. To be able to design the machine itself as part of the system would be a huge breakthrough – the sort of thing that, if it happens, people may look back and wonder how anybody did anything before. I get excited thinking about it. Unfortunately, we still don't have any evidence that it's real. Read carefully, the article rather suggests the opposite.

by kbd 14y ago

loup-vaillant 14y ago

What I take from this presentation is much, much more than lots of memory. Apparently, these things can also do processing, like an FPGA. The result would be a whole system on a chip, only the design is almost entirely pushed up at the "software" level. To me, that's even more game changing than a mere petabyte on a square inch. "Specialized" hardware is made easy. Complete re-purposing becomes possible. Most hardware compatibility issues just go away. And of course, it will be much, much easier to experiment with novel and totally crazy architectures. Oh, and they say it can re-configure itself on the fly, very rapidly. So, it's not just easy innovations on hardware. It's metamorph hardware. Imagine for instance code that compiles down to logic gates, instead of very high level assembly code, possibly on the fly. Or, re-allocating hardware resources by the second, depending on your needs.

gruseom 14y ago
It's an exhilarating vision, because it would get a whole lot of accidental limitations out of our way and allow us to build the essence of a design. A lot of complexity is due to the impedance mismatch between what goes on at the lowest level vs. the highest. To be able to design the machine itself as part of the system would be a huge breakthrough – the sort of thing that, if it happens, people may look back and wonder how anybody did anything before. I get excited thinking about it. Unfortunately, we still don't have any evidence that it's real. Read carefully, the article rather suggests the opposite.