back to article HP's faster-than-flash memristor at least TWO years away

HP memristor-meister Stan Williams has revealed a product launch delay – saying commercial kit would be available by 2014 at the earliest – and said processor chips would eventually use nanoscale light networking. He was speaking at a Kavli Foundation Roundtable – the Kavli Foundation being one of those US charitable thingies …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. David Simpson 1
    FAIL

    So they are not making money off the technology they invented and developed - they just hope to build them in to better PCs than their rivals ? This sentence alone explains why HP are so utterly f**ked.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Building stuff is risky and expensive, especially if you don't have the expertise in R&D. Cheaper to just licence it out?

    2. Nigel 11
      WTF?

      Ever heard of patent royalties?

    3. Blain Hamon
      Joke

      I figure they hope to make it up in selling memristor ink cartridges.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Thanks, leave us with expensive, slow, short lifetime flash SSD's because it will cost your fabricator to much profit to dump the old tech in favour of the new!

  3. Trevor 7
    FAIL

    Traditional big business failure

    Traditional sitting on a good idea because it wont make them a huge pile of cash immediately.

    Interesting that HP and Hynix are publicly admitting that instead of taking their better faster product to market they are intentionally stalling and spending money, giving competing products a chance to get established first.

    A few large HP and Hynix shareholders should really be asking some questions with the assistance of their lawyers.

    The last case of this I heard of, was the Compact Fluorescent Lights. Company that developed them was going to pigeon hole them due to lack of profitability, but a competitor came up with the plans and began producing them.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Traditional big business failure

      Another interpretation would be that they are not sitting on the technology because it is all hypothetical stuff which isn't commercially viable.

      1. shockley0011

        Re: Traditional big business failure

        >>Another interpretation would be that they are not sitting on the technology because it is all hypothetical stuff which isn't commercially viable.<<

        Exactly! Williams probably lied to save his job from the buy it now CEO purge (Meg Whitman) and is now stringing her along. The scientists can tell her anything because she doesn't know chips from tacos.

        If Hynix can make an SSD that lasts 10X as long, goes 10X as fast, for 1/10 the cost, meanwhile driving all competitors from the market, they're going to do it.

        Even if this means that 3 years later no one will need Flash devices because the ones they now have last 30 years, it will have been worth it. Do the math.

    2. Don Jefe
      Meh

      Re: Traditional big business failure

      It is called the 'Inventors Dilema' and the very issue you speak of has had much written about it. If you're really interested in why companies do things like this you should do some reading on the subject. It is quite interesting.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Correct me if I am wrong, but

    wasn't IBM the original organization that did the early work on this technology (they coined the term "memristor" and did the initial research) and doesn't Samsung own most of the patents related to memristors? HP is no where near the first or the organization that has been working on this technology the longest. As has been mentioned, they don't even do chip level work.... If anyone is going to come out with memristors, it will be a chip design-engineering company, like IBM, or a memory specialist, like Samsung.

  5. shockley0011

    Re: Correct me if I am wrong

    >>wasn't IBM the original organization that did the early work on this technology (they coined the term "memristor" and did the initial research<<

    No. Leon Chua, a physicist at Berkeley theorized it in 1971 and HP "discovered" and characterized the real world phenomenon in 2008. Search on youtube for "memristor williams". I particularly recommend the first segment of this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9u9o_ToQwM which contains a demonstration of a memristor/cognitive device and explains the enormous advantage compared to AI using traditional computer circuitry.

    >>doesn't Samsung own most of the patents related to memristors?<<

    I have heard this also. I was aware of Samsung's RRAM efforts long before I was aware of HP's, but I have no first hand knowledge of the patent situation. Williams confirms, however, that Samsung has a larger team working on it than HP/Hynix.

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like