electronics, we've had only three types of circuit components--resistors, inductors, and capacitors. But in 1971, UC Berkeley researcher Leon Chua theorized the possibility of a fourth type of component, one that would be able to measure the flow of electric current: the memristor. Now, just 37 years later, Hewlett-Packard has built one.
What is it? As the name implies, the memristor can "remember" how much current is passed through them. And by changing the amount of electricity that passes through it, a memristor can also become a one-element circuit component with unique properties. Above all, they can save their electronic state, even if the current is turned off so that it replace a good candidate for today's flash memory.
Memristor is theoretically cheaper and much faster than flash memory and allows much greater storage densities. You could also replace RAM chips as we know it, so that after you turn off your computer, it will remember exactly what she did, when you turn it on again, and return to work immediately. This reduction in costs and consolidating of components may bring affordable, solid-state computers that fit in your pocket and run faster in order to carry many times more than today's PCs.
Someday the memristor could spawn a whole new type of computer, thanks to his ability, a number of electrical states rather than the simplistic "on" and "off", it means recognizing that today's digital processors recall. By working with a dynamic range of data states in an analog mode, memristor-based computers could be capable of much more complex tasks than just commuting to ones and zeros.
When will it be? Researchers say that no real barrier prevents implementing the memristor in circuitry immediately. But it's the business side to push products through to commercial reality. Memristors made to replace flash memory (at a lower cost and lower power consumption) is likely to appear first, HP has the objective to provide them until 2012. In addition, memristors probably replace both DRAM and hard disks in the 2014-to-2016 time frame. What memristor-based analog computer, so this step can be over 20 years.
Memristor is theoretically cheaper and much faster than flash memory and allows much greater storage densities. You could also replace RAM chips as we know it, so that after you turn off your computer, it will remember exactly what she did, when you turn it on again, and return to work immediately. This reduction in costs and consolidating of components may bring affordable, solid-state computers that fit in your pocket and run faster in order to carry many times more than today's PCs.
Someday the memristor could spawn a whole new type of computer, thanks to his ability, a number of electrical states rather than the simplistic "on" and "off", it means recognizing that today's digital processors recall. By working with a dynamic range of data states in an analog mode, memristor-based computers could be capable of much more complex tasks than just commuting to ones and zeros.
When will it be? Researchers say that no real barrier prevents implementing the memristor in circuitry immediately. But it's the business side to push products through to commercial reality. Memristors made to replace flash memory (at a lower cost and lower power consumption) is likely to appear first, HP has the objective to provide them until 2012. In addition, memristors probably replace both DRAM and hard disks in the 2014-to-2016 time frame. What memristor-based analog computer, so this step can be over 20 years.
32-Core CPUs From Intel and AMD
officially a dinosaur. In fact, quad-core computing is now commonplace; you can even get laptop computers with four cores today. But we're really just at the beginning of the core wars: Leadership in the CPU market will soon be decided by who has the most cores, not who has the fastest clock speed.
What is it? With the gigahertz race largely abandoned, both AMD and Intel are trying to pack more cores on one die to continue to improve performance and help with multitasking operations. Further miniaturization of chips are key to the adaptation of these cores and other components in a limited space. Intel will roll out 32-nanometer processors (by today's 45-nm chips) in 2009.When will it be? Intel has been very good about sticking to his timetable. Base a six-core CPU on the Itanium design should be out soon, when Intel then shifts focus to an entirely new architecture called Nehalem, which will be marketed as Core i7. Core i7 have up to eight cores, with eight-core systems in 2009 or 2010. (And an eight-core AMD project called Montreal is supposedly on tap for 2009.)
Then the timeline receives focus. Intel reportedly canceled a 32-core project called Keifer, planned for 2010, possibly because of their complexity (not confirm the company, though). That many cores requires a new way of dealing with memory, apparently can not have 32 brains pulled out from a central pool of RAM. But we still expect cores to proliferate when the kinks are ironed out: 16 cores by 2011 or 2012 is plausible (when transistors are predicted to fall again in the 22-nm), easily reachable with 32 cores by 2013 or 2014 . Intel says "hundreds" of cores may even continue to come down the line.
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