8 ms·

Memristors (long promised and still not quite here) also bring together the ideas of long-term and short-term memory into one and, in future incarnations, even

Memristors (long promised and still not quite here) also bring together the ideas of long-term and short-term memory into one and, in future incarnations, even promise to bring computation and storage together.

pjc50 12y ago
You can get that today with FRAM, although not at high density. TI do microcontroller eval boards with built in FRAM; you can have your device resume automatically from power loss with all its memory still there.
- mafuyu 12y ago
  The problem with FRAM is that it wears very quickly. That's why it hasn't seen wider use.
valarauca1 12y ago
When they work (there is to much cash on the table for them not too), they'll completely change the way we think of volatile and non-volatile memory. Since all memory will be non-volatile. It'll be a huge paradigm shift in storage and IO speed.
- nacnud 12y ago
  .. and possibly give viruses more places to hide?
  - deeviant 12y ago
    Na, virus already hide both on disk and in memory.
  - valarauca1 12y ago
    Unlikely. Unless we start making file systems different.
    - sillysaurus3 12y ago
      Spectators may want to archive this HN thread for posterity, because I suspect nacnud will have the last laugh. (Nacnud's comment is currently sitting at about -3 points.) It's unlikely that future technological advancements will give malware authors more tools to work with? That seems unlikely, if history is any indication. Imagine when you have 1TB of non-volatile storage which operates at speeds close to those we currently enjoy for DDR3 memory. Most average consumers won't use all of that space. It seems entirely plausible that a virus will write itself to some area that is never overwritten. It becomes a latent piece of malware, invisible to any filesystem, but activatable on demand by some other hard-to-detect malware. This two-step scheme would be difficult to detect since the second component does nothing except activate the first component (stored in nonvolatile storage) under some specified criteria. Or, how about key generation or password input? Remember cperciva's post about how it was extremely difficult or even impossible to zero a memory buffer correctly? Now add in the idea that suddenly "everything is nonvolatile" and you get a perfect storm for security concerns: if a program segfaults or is terminated mid-operation, then suddenly any sensitive data it had spit out into memory might be capturable by other programs. Or, since it's nonvolatile, those secrets will persist "forever" (until they're overwritten, which may be a long, long time if storage is plentiful) and you may inadvertently leak secrets when you sell your memristor-backed storage. Whoever buys it can do some digging and uncover whatever was written into that buffer, if it's truly non-volatile storage. So, while the future is exciting, underestimating the security implications probably isn't a good idea. We can develop new methodologies to combat the new security concerns, but new security concerns will almost certainly come to fruition. Of course, calling the concerns "new" is somewhat unfair, since new concerns are almost always very old concerns manifesting themselves in new domains, but new domains usually enable malware writers with new toolsets to exploit.
      - innguest 12y ago
        Also let's not forget HP said it's possible that memristors will also perform computation, which melds RAM, HDD and CPU into one and makes for a potentially wilder environment for viruses.
  - avn2109 12y ago
    Also, it'll be a wide and fallow field for the NSA's insertion of backdoors.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    Viruses are still a thing? Used to get them regularly on my Windows 3 -> Windows XP/2000 days. Haven't seen them much in Linux or OS X in the last 15 years. There might have been one or two. But I doubt you can find 10. And the number of users I've seen reported as affected by one was also laughable, something like 1% of all users of less (half to around 1 million). The non-hacker media of course always touts this or that trojan that actually needs user intervention to be installed as a "virus".
doubt_me 12y ago
I thought HP had been working on it since at least 2008 (when I heard they got it to work) I just assumed they are integrating it into their new super computer

pjc50 12y ago

You can get that today with FRAM, although not at high density. TI do microcontroller eval boards with built in FRAM; you can have your device resume automatically from power loss with all its memory still there.

mafuyu 12y ago
The problem with FRAM is that it wears very quickly. That's why it hasn't seen wider use.

valarauca1 12y ago

When they work (there is to much cash on the table for them not too), they'll completely change the way we think of volatile and non-volatile memory. Since all memory will be non-volatile. It'll be a huge paradigm shift in storage and IO speed.

nacnud 12y ago
.. and possibly give viruses more places to hide?
- deeviant 12y ago
  Na, virus already hide both on disk and in memory.
- valarauca1 12y ago
  Unlikely. Unless we start making file systems different.
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    Spectators may want to archive this HN thread for posterity, because I suspect nacnud will have the last laugh. (Nacnud's comment is currently sitting at about -3 points.) It's unlikely that future technological advancements will give malware authors more tools to work with? That seems unlikely, if history is any indication. Imagine when you have 1TB of non-volatile storage which operates at speeds close to those we currently enjoy for DDR3 memory. Most average consumers won't use all of that space. It seems entirely plausible that a virus will write itself to some area that is never overwritten. It becomes a latent piece of malware, invisible to any filesystem, but activatable on demand by some other hard-to-detect malware. This two-step scheme would be difficult to detect since the second component does nothing except activate the first component (stored in nonvolatile storage) under some specified criteria. Or, how about key generation or password input? Remember cperciva's post about how it was extremely difficult or even impossible to zero a memory buffer correctly? Now add in the idea that suddenly "everything is nonvolatile" and you get a perfect storm for security concerns: if a program segfaults or is terminated mid-operation, then suddenly any sensitive data it had spit out into memory might be capturable by other programs. Or, since it's nonvolatile, those secrets will persist "forever" (until they're overwritten, which may be a long, long time if storage is plentiful) and you may inadvertently leak secrets when you sell your memristor-backed storage. Whoever buys it can do some digging and uncover whatever was written into that buffer, if it's truly non-volatile storage. So, while the future is exciting, underestimating the security implications probably isn't a good idea. We can develop new methodologies to combat the new security concerns, but new security concerns will almost certainly come to fruition. Of course, calling the concerns "new" is somewhat unfair, since new concerns are almost always very old concerns manifesting themselves in new domains, but new domains usually enable malware writers with new toolsets to exploit.
    - innguest 12y ago
      Also let's not forget HP said it's possible that memristors will also perform computation, which melds RAM, HDD and CPU into one and makes for a potentially wilder environment for viruses.
- avn2109 12y ago
  Also, it'll be a wide and fallow field for the NSA's insertion of backdoors.
- coldtea 12y ago
  Viruses are still a thing? Used to get them regularly on my Windows 3 -> Windows XP/2000 days. Haven't seen them much in Linux or OS X in the last 15 years. There might have been one or two. But I doubt you can find 10. And the number of users I've seen reported as affected by one was also laughable, something like 1% of all users of less (half to around 1 million). The non-hacker media of course always touts this or that trojan that actually needs user intervention to be installed as a "virus".

doubt_me 12y ago

I thought HP had been working on it since at least 2008 (when I heard they got it to work) I just assumed they are integrating it into their new super computer