The Qualcomm Institute
12 HN recommenders · recommended in 11 months, 2010–2024
47:52 · 133K views · Jan 22, 2010
R. Stanley Williams of HP Labs gives a keynote on the memristor, covering the physics, crossbar computation, and potential for memory and new computer architectures.
Recommended for years as the best technical introduction to memristors from the person who found the physical device.
17 comments from Hacker News
We may actually see them both happening at once; one of the things R. Stanley Williams talks about in his excellent memristor talk is a method they developed for stacking hundreds of chips on top of a processor, which he says may end up providing just as much benefit as the memristor itself. The possibilities that could be opened up by having a terabyte or more of extremely fast non volatile storage attached by a bus as large as you care to make it directly on top of a CPU are mind boggling. Then when you consider that you can use them as FPGAs for computation instead and dynamically reconfigure them... wow. Memristors are only a year or two away from commercial availability, though it will probably be a while after that until they live up to the hype. We live in exciting times. The talk: this video
This is an interesting implementation of the memristor, but I still think the real breakthrough will be in the two state memristor [1]. Once memristor fabrication technology is mature, we are going to see a massive paradigm shift away from the Von Neumann architecture. All the details are in the linked video by HP's Stan Williams. Definitely worth a watch if you're interested in the future of computing 1. this video (start at 38m for future computing implications) EDIT: Another video [2], but a bit more in depth. Recommended if the material in the first was a bit confusing as Stan was short on time to explain some of the details. 2. [LINK]
I don't understand why Leon Chua keeps popping up first when memristors are discussed. Williams at HP is the person that made it a reality. Chua postulated the existence of the memristor but as far as I know made no progress on a working example. That's a bit like giving da Vinci credit for the invention of the helicopter. The Williams talk on youtube is really good. He discusses the element itself, its use in memory (as vast amounts of on-CPU memory) as well as the possibility of new CPU architectures based on it: this video
How i learned to stop worrying and love the miniaturization: this video Seriously, watch it. Memristor-tech relies on this kind of miniaturization and can provide a speed boost in several areas in current architectures. Secondly, having worked for semi: there's a lot of conservative force holding back development. We could have had current tech with much less worries than we have now if they didn't respond so allergically to everything that looks a little exotic in the CMOS process, like high-k dielectrics.
There's a presentation by R. Stanley Williams linked to in the article, and it is well worth watching. this video It has some tidbits I didn't expect. Teaser: "one of the guys in my group has...built a compiler to compile C code using implication logic rather than NAND logic and, interestingly enough, when we play with that the compiled code we get is always more condensed...by about a factor of 3"