My main concern with the hype around memristors is how quickly the technology will scale. Yes, they have great promise. But if technical problems make them 4 times bigger and 8 times slower than existing technology, nobody will adopt them. And without volume adoption, they won't have enough investment dollars to be able to exceed Moore's Law. Which means that we won't care about them until well after Moore's Law runs out of steam.

This is not a theoretical failure mode. It has happened before in the computer industry. Multiple times.

For example it is why Transmeta died. Their goal was to have a simple chip that was so fast that they could emulate the x86 faster than the x86 could run. They failed. However one of the design goals was less heat (because heat was a major scaling barrier), which translated into having an emulated x86 chip that with much lower power. Given that they had a simpler architecture and had already solved heat problems that were killing Intel and AMD they hoped to iterate faster, and eventually win. But the investment asymmetry was so huge that they couldn't execute on the plan. And Intel was able to reduce their power enough to undercut Transmeta on the niche they had found, and Transmeta couldn't survive. (Intel was aggressive because they understood the strategy and the potential. Transmeta was always going to be something that either wiped out the existing industry or died with a whimper, and Intel knew which outcome they'd prefer.)