Don't believe the hype. People in the microelectronics world are already searching for the Holly grail, e.g. the universal memory a long time. The previous candidate was MRAM or magnetic RAM but did not follow on the hype.
Maybe memristors is the next Holly grail but I find the chance small. Problem is that memristors are a kind of resistive memories. They depend on the change of the solid state of materials to get a change in resistance. I think this will always be more involved then putting a few electrons on a small capacitor which is the base for DRAM.
More less hype driven info is here
greets,
Staf.
So, to paraphrase your main argument, you're saying "Because this earlier technology didn't live up to it's promise, I doubt this newer technology will live up to its promise either". Forgive me if I take such a notion with a grain of salt, I prefer to assess each individual technology on its own merits.
Besides, I never used the term 'holy grail', you chose to use this label, it's not my fault if you choose to use such inaccurate labels. The point I've been trying to get across is that memristors can be very beneficial for improving FPGAs, which will be beneficial for the computer system I'm proposing. I've hinted at a couple of times that a memristor-based RAM wouldn't be competitive with DRAM yet, but only mentioned this as an aside, as it's the performance improvements being brought to FPGAs that is relevant to this discussion.
However, as you brought it up, let's take a look at the challenges that memristors face to be a viable replacement for DRAM. The two main issues are:
1. Memristor-based RAM would currently be slower than DRAM.
2. Need to increase the read-write lifecycles that can be achieved with memristors before it can replace DRAM.
Let's put some approximate numbers in place for the points above so we know the level of challenges were looking at. When memristors were first discovered, there was talk that they were approximately x10 slower than DRAM. With regards to read-write lifecycles, current memristors have been show to have approximately 1 million read-write lifecycles.
It's worth bearing in mind that memristors are a new technology, whereas DRAM is a mature technology. However, since the discovery of memristors there have a lot of companies investing in R&D on this technology. Case in point, the speed. Back in 2008 we were looking at x10 slower performance. In 2012, we're now looking at equivalent write performance. See here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16725529Recently, the Japanese memory manufacturer Elpida announced it had produced a prototype ReRAM memory with speeds comparable to DRAM.
"Its most attractive feature is that it can read/write data at high speeds using little voltage," Elpida said in a press release.
"It has a write speed of 10 nanoseconds, about the same as DRAM.
So in some ways, the speed gap issue has been addressed. The remaining issue then is the read-write cycles. I anticipate the companies working on memristor-tech for non-volatile storage will invest resources in improving the hardiness of memristor devices, and these benefits should eventually reach a tipping point where memristors become 'good enough' to replace DRAM. For example, if the read-write lifecycle improves to the point where memristor-based RAM would last 5 years in continuous use, this should be good enough performance to enable widespread memristor-based RAM usage. Also, the improved capacity of memristor devices may help this change happen sooner. If a 32GB memristor device was a lower cost than a 2GB DRAM, you could sell the memristor device as a 2GB DRAM replacement and use the massive redundancy to your advantage (effectively obtaining 16 million read-write cycles with current memristor performance using wear levelling).
With all that said, memristor-based RAM is off topic for what is being proposed, it's the improvements to FPGAs that matter here. I hope we can get back on topic now.
