8bitfuture:

New computer technology delayed until 2014.

HP have revealed that their new memristor technology won’t be commercially available until 2014.

Memristors are a new type of building block for electrical circuits which are able to maintain a stable flow of electricity through a circuit like a resistor, while also maintaining the charge when power is lost to allow it to be used as memory as well. They will potentially replace flash memory in computers and allow them to become faster, cheaper, and more power efficient.

HP’s Stan Williams has said that commercial kits have been delayed until the end of 2014 at the earliest, after initially hoping they would be available next year. Still not bad for a device that was only created for the first time in 2008. It seems the hold up is to do with the fact that Hynix - who will make the memristors - also make flash memory. Memristors will start to eat away at that flash memory business, while being cheaper and bringing in less money for the company, leaving Hynix in a tricky situation.

He downgraded the importance of Moore’s Law: “People talk about reaching the end of Moore’s Law, but really, it’s irrelevant. Transistors are not a rate-limiting factor in today’s computers. We could improve transistors by factor of 1,000 and it would have no impact on the modern computer. The rate-limiting parts are how you store and move information. These are visible targets and we know what we have to do to get there. We can continue to improve data centres and computers at Moore’s Law rates – doubling performance every 18 months – for at least another 20 years without getting into something like quantum or neuronal computing.”  

(Source: theregister.co.uk, via emergentfutures)