Au or PT
That is EXPENSIVE
I just bought a platinum ring for my GF and I can tell.. 1500$/Oz -> about 50$ per GRAM.
Boffins devising Resistive RAM (RRAM) have found that using porous silicon oxide makes the devices easier to manufacture, longer lasting and less power hungry. The researchers, at Rice University, Texas, stumbled upon silicon oxide RRAM five years ago. The stuff works as computer storage by having differing resistance levels …
A dielectric material is not defined by its lack of ability to conduct electricity; the property of being dielectric refers to its ability to be polarised by an electric field. It may be that the silicon dioxide has dielectirc propertes that are useful in this application, or it may be that its properties as an insulator are why it is used. Either way, some stable, reversible and non-destructive change is taking place.
Abstract of actual paper gives sub-50ns switching speed which is very good, but IIRC (corrections welcome) memristors are promising sub-10ns latencies. While sub-50ns is excellent, sub-10ns is revolutionary, as it would allow CPUs to drop cache memory.
Of course both technologies are in early stages. Perhaps RRAM will put a little more pressure on HP to develop memristors right (or provide them alternative to switch into, if they fail to do it), so this development is encouraging even if one is cheering HP efforts.
No it wouldn't. Even if the RAM chips could achieve that type of speed, the long wires of the memory bus could not. At those frequencies, a wire isn't a wire - it's a capacitor.
There's an exception to this though - it would let you skip the cache in embedded systems. It's commonplace in that field to use SoCs where the memory is on the same die as the processor, or at least in the same package. Faster performance, and save some real estate, which translates to cheaper chips. The mobile phone industry would be very happy.