Tech company Hewlett-Packard recently announced that it will build a system using the fourth fundamental component of circuitry, the memristor. The system will be called "The Machine" and HP estimates that it will be available before the turn of the decade.
The announcement was made on Tuesday at the HP Discover conference held at Las Vegas. On this conference, HP also announced that by 2016 the company will be able to market memristor-based DIMMs. This memory module will combine the excellent storage densities of hard disk drives and the unparalleled performance of a traditional dynamic-RAM.
HP systems research vice president John Sontag said that The Machine will use electrons, photons and ions for processing, communication and storage respectively. Unlike traditional silicon processors that use electrons, memristors will use ions. Sontag added that the photons will be used because they want to use optical interconnection within the system.
Many analysts say that if HP could build such computer design, it will revolutionize the whole concept of computing.
Right now, computing relies on two memory hierarchy. Volatile memory such as RAM can be very fast but can only hold a limited capacity. Hard drives on the other hand can hold large quantity of data but can be very slow. Building on this pros and cons the memristor aims to combine the fast speed of a RAM with the storage capability of a hard drive, according to Ars Technica.
The memristor was first conceptualized in 1971 by circuit theorist Leon Chua, according to CNN. It took 37 arduous years of engineering to finally build the first memristor. It was built by Hewlett-Packard in 2008.