10 ms·
A memristor is the 4th fundamental circuit component, along with capacitors, resistors, and inductors. The important part of memristors is that they can be arr
by valarauca1 12y ago
A memristor is the 4th fundamental circuit component, along with capacitors, resistors, and inductors.
The important part of memristors is that they can be arranged to form a crossbar latch, which acts like a transistor.
This crossbar latches are very very small, and very low power. HP plans on achieving data density of 100GB/cm^2 [1] with read write speeds approximately 100x faster then flash memory while using 1% of the energy. Also with lower energy costs, expected data density is 1 Petabyte per cm^3 (due to 3D stacked circuitry)
Basically when this technology comes of age we'll see smart phones reach the order of terabytes of storage.
[1] http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1168454 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1168454
- toomuchtodo 12y ago> Basically when this technology comes of age we'll see smart phones reach the order of terabytes of storage. Looking forward to carrying the library of congress, netflix's entire catalog, and all of openstreetmap on my phone in the next 5 years.
- sliverstorm 12y agoSoftware grows to match the hardware. If storage goes up 100x, data will grow to accommodate. Some things won't grow, to be sure. Anything text-based, for example. But movies, music, pictures... would probably all explode in fidelity and thus size.
- viraptor 12y agoWould movies and music really explode? Music hit the ceiling long time ago - nobody's going to go for higher resolution / sampling rate than the current "uncompressed" sound. Big publishers are intentionally sacrificing the quality for loudness anyway. Movies can practically scale up to retina-equivalent on wall-size equivalent only. Even then not many people will want TVs bigger than they can look at without moving their eyes... Pictures could still grow, especially the internal raw representation taken from the light capturing element, but that's likely to be down-scaled when saving to kill noise. What else is there that really takes space? (that is not limited by the effective resolution of human senses)
- TkTech 12y agoSensor data is one I would guess. Modern cell phones have an incredible number of sensors in them, but usually don't log the data when it's quickly sampled (accelerometers, background mic), or sample it rarely/slowly (GPS, barometer, ambient lighting) when it is logged. I would personally love to have days, weeks, or months of raw data sampled frequently. Edit: I'd imagine this is due both to a limited amount of storage, a limited number of writes to current sold-state mediums, and energy usage, all of which this technology appears to solve.
- DelwinAmber 12y agoEnergy usage is the huge one - if this is applied to computing and not just storage then maybe.
- valarauca1 12y agoSensor data is dirt cheap to store. Even at 100 data points per second. It takes 10 seconds to store a kilobyte of data (1000) data points). At 64 bits per point. 1GB/s of streaming data is 10,737,418 channels of 100 point per second 64bit floats.
- swalsh 12y agoThink about the oculus rift, movies/media might become a lot more complicated as VR or VR like technology comes of age. Or if its not VR there might be some other technology.
- noobermin 12y agoI think my argument is that we will find new things to store on our PC's similar to how we found new stuff to store on our PC's from the 90s till now. I guess it is hard to imagine, but let's dream a bit...one ridiculous possibility that I've thought about is consider something like google glass. Imagine recording every moment of your day from your smart phone, and not just when you wake up. Why would you do this? Well, may be there for little things like having a meeting with someone and you want to remember details without writing it down. Why take the time to record it manually when you have the ability to do it in HD, for cheap? Again, this is hard to imagine wanting to do especially for privacy reasons, but were things like facebook and twitter easy to imagine in the 80s? As things things have changed, so have social norms...I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, I'm just stating an observation. So, I happen to not have any HD vids on my laptop at the moment, but I have a normal video on my laptop that is 10 minutes long that is 70 MB. For something like recording video for 10 hours say, that's 6 * 70 * 10~4GB. So, yeah that's about 250 days (little less than a year) on your smart phone at 1 TB ignoring all other things (full seasons of vids of shows, as another commenter mentioned, stuff like raw gps data that could be added to the video, other things), so may be it isn't quite reaching the limit but it's a good example for how as we have more space for stuff, it is possible to imagine finding more things to fill your smartphone's new TB of storage with.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- aragot 12y ago> Software grows to match the hardware. You mean XML for instance?
- swalsh 12y agoNot sure why he was downvoted, xml is a trade off for developer convenience. A trade off we were willing to make because we had disposable bits.
- valarauca1 12y agoWhat was the trade off? Harder to parse files for less human readability?
- Touche 12y agoWhat was the predecessor to xml that was easier to read?
- biot 12y ago"If GML was an infant, SGML is the bright youngster who far exceeds expectations and made its parents too proud, but XML is the drug-addicted gang member who had committed his first murder before he had sex, which was rape." -- Erik Naggum GML is from the late 1960s and is, arguably, easier to read. SGML from the 1980s expanded upon this. XML is essentially just an offshoot of SGML and much less readable than SGML is. For example, here is a valid SGML document: <anthology> <poem> <title>The SICK ROSE <stanza> <line>O Rose thou art sick. <line>The invisible worm, <line>That flies in the night <line>In the howling storm: <stanza> <line>Has found out thy bed <line>Of crimson joy: <line>And his dark secret love <line>Does thy life destroy. <poem> <!-- more poems go here --> </anthology> Aside from XML's lineage, there is no shortage of markup languages available with varying levels of readability.
- Touche 12y ago
- 7952 12y agoBandwidth won't grow and IMHO that is now the chief constraint in computing. For low usage it is cheaper to store data on S3 for a month than buying the bandwidth to transfer it once!
- grinich 12y agoWe'll think about media in a completely different way when this happens.
- angersock 12y agoNo, we'll just use the same shitty car and theft and property analogies.
- figglesonrails 12y agoCan't wait to see it: You wouldn't steal a Library of Congress...
- valarauca1 12y agoThe bigger problem is telecoms won't sell any bandwidth. So everything will have to shared via sneaker net.
- noobermin 12y agoAs in shuffing around our terabytes of "illicit" storage by hiding terabyte thumbdrives in our sneakers?
- valarauca1 12y agoWell if we're still capped at say broadband speeds, just driving down the street with your 50TB cellphone doesn't seem like much of a loss. Maybe we should allow net neutrality to fall, increase socialization as a result :-) lol. :.:.: Also no, sneaker net means a network transported by feet not wires. But I do like the joke, or I pray its a joke not a prophesy.
- valarauca1 12y agoThis means we might be able to make a literal version of the hitchhikers guide. All of human knowledge in your hand, no network connectivity needed.
- politician 12y ago> I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices [of copyright attorneys and trade industry groups] suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
- pistle 12y agoYou dropped your phone on the corner?
- pavement 12y agoGuess again. All that storage represents a virtually limitless crypto-space within which intellectual property rights holders can create one-time-pads, and disenfranchise future consumers with. When combined with ubiquitous 4G coverage, all they'll ever need to stream are the limitless persistent auth tokens, as locking and unlocking assets as frequently as bandwidth will allow, while remaining profitable. I bet some of the greediest and most tyrranical IP controllers will have 1:1 authentication ratios, with each and every text character, audio sample and pixel per video frame, such that they'll never reduce bandwidth, and even create backlogs of access history, for billing purposes, when network connectivity returns. Yes, because you accessed five seconds of full motion video, and witnessed content in which Lady Gaga's eyes moved five pixels to the left, while she pronounced a fricative syllable in the third verse of her top 40 hit single, you now owe Viacom 1/20th of one cent. NOTE: Costs do not include third-party fees covering closed-captioning for the hearing impared.
- fchollet 12y agoAll of Wikipedia (English) already fits on a smartphone with a 64GB SD card.
- sp332 12y ago
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- grrowl 12y agoOf course, it'll all be in hyper-HD 8K video and with 3D map fidelity down to the centimetre
- Houshalter 12y agoThis is already somewhat feasible and someone is actually working on it: http://memkite.com/blog/2014/04/01/technical-feasibility-of-building-hitchikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-i-e-offline-web-search-part-i/ http://memkite.com/blog/2014/04/01/technical-feasibility-of-...
- higherpurpose 12y agoI assume the initial prices will also be 10x more per GB than what we have now, too, much like SSDs and flash storage in the beginning (it's still the case actually) - compared to flash storage that is - so 100x more per GB than HDD storage.
- valarauca1 12y agoIt'll come down. Demand will be massive (if it lives up to the hype). This could potentially unify the RAM and Hard disks in computers.
- DelwinAmber 12y agoThere will always be a place for yet faster memory. Does this compete with the registers and L1/L2 cache in terms of speed?
- avmich 12y agoBut at least caches are often transparent to software, thus don't affect software as much.
- valarauca1 12y agoLikely my basic understanding of memristors they require a certain ramp time. So I don't think it'll replace cache.
- leishulang 12y agoit doesn't need to. If it's faster than the whole 'caching' procedure, than it is faster regardless.
- Synaesthesia 12y agoNot only that but it has the potential to change our entire model of computing, and simplify it tremendously. The unification of storage and computing.
- DelwinAmber 12y agoCPU's may end up looking more like GPU's with thousands of registers.
- oh_teh_meows 12y agoCompiler optimizations that are currently impeded because of register pressure can be enabled to its fullest extent, thereby increasing program speed even more. Compiler writers also get more breathing room to design better optimizations.
- mzs 12y agoor with very few registers per thread on die with the rest in storage ala TMS9900 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS9900 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS9900
- figglesonrails 12y agoUnification of storage and computing...what does that even mean? I get that having nearly unlimited, fast, persistent storage would be awesome, but that's not a conceptual merging of storage and computing -- but I definitely agree about the simplification.
- Synaesthesia 12y agoWell only one pool of data, no more registers, cache, hard drives etc. The storage will live next to the logic. What's more, memristors can act was logic units as well as storage, and do it interchangeably.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
- panabee 12y agohow many years away until you expect the technology to hit markets?
- Synaesthesia 12y agoImpossible to predict, but it seems we are getting the fabrication down.
- radicalbyte 12y agoSo storage is 1x10^6 larger, and read/write speeds are 1x10^2 faster. So it'll take 1x10^4 times as long to copy the capacity.
- AnimalMuppet 12y agoI'll take that tradeoff in exchange for 10^6 larger capacity, any day.
- cmaggard 12y agoIt will take 1e4 times as long to completely fill that device proportionally to an older one, yes, but that's still two orders of magnitude faster than it would be to fill that equivalent amount of space with the older write speed.
- hoprocker 12y agoIf you're making comparisons based on physical displacement, sure. But it's probably more helpful to think about how fast it will copy an equivalent number of bits, and from this perspective it actually will, indeed, take 1x10^-2 the time of flash storage.
- runeks 12y agoIf you can figure out how to put enough memristors in parallel, the transfer speed is essentially unlimited. It's the access time (latency) that is crucial, and makes all the difference, because it is inherent to the technology, and cannot be changed regardless of how many elements you string together. This explains it well: http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html?HN_report=1 http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html?HN_... Several new non-volatile memory technologies have achieved latency down to 100 picoseconds. This is an order of magnitude faster than the L1 cache on a CPU (SRAM). CPU power will again becomes the bottleneck, instead of storage. We will have to build completely new CPU architectures to make us of this though.
- aidenn0 12y agoNote that other companies had been working on switched resistance crossbar latches with metal oxides before HP, they just didn't have a fancy name for it.
- aaronblohowiak 12y agoThe name comes from the 1971 paper from Leon Chua.. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1083337&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F8147%2F23413%2F01083337 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=108333...
- aidenn0 12y agoYes, but referring to varying resistance metal-oxides as memristors is much more recent (2008ish I think) and is still somewhat controversioal.