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Comment by squigs25 | Hacker News Reader

Soooo... this is basically just persistent memory right?

HP has been working on the memristor since 2008. Memristors have already been produced in labs by U of Michigan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor

This article seeks to give the image that this is a novel idea that investors can take advantage of. In reality, it is not.

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Actually, the cool bit about memristors is that you could treat them like both a transistor for computation or for memory, or flip. Like an fpga.

So imagine the difference in an operating system that could retain its running image between reboots, and not have to distinguish things like stack/heap.

And could reconfigure more computing resources on the fly and back again.

It is... a very different view of computing. Exciting though.

So imagine the difference in an operating system that could retain its running image between reboots

What do you mean by this? This sounds like hibernation to me.

not have to distinguish things like stack/heap

I'm lost here too. This is a distinction that is made for purposes of program structure, not to kotow to demands of hardware.

Okay, imagine that to put your computer into hibernation mode all you need to do is hit the power button. This is instantaneous because none of the data has to be synced to permanent memory, because it's already in permanent, non-volatile memory.

I'm not sure what he means by distinguishing between stack/heap either.

The stack heap is a bit of a jab at the harvard architecture in general.

I see memristors as being closer to a Von Neumann architecture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture

Even then its not a perfect analogy admittedly. Sorry for the confusion!

I guess a better analogy would be able to be get rid of the idea of "loaded into memory" versus "in ram" versus on permanent storage.

It sounds like hibernation but it isn't exactly. Hibernation the ram is off loaded to the HDD and read back into ram on boot.

With this system your ram would be constant. You could pull the plug on your computer any time, and everything would still be there. It would start in the exact same state it was in before the power loss, no data loss, no corruption.

An operating system can retain its memory between reboots using only RAM, as long as the reboots are not "cold" reboots (that is, machine powered off and then back on, or reset through hardware instead of software).

It of course depends on hardware support, but it can be done even today on select platforms.

the first computer I worked on a PDP11/40 with core memory retained state when powered off :-)

Funnily enough the memristors seem to have much the same way of working as old core memory. I'm not sure I really buy the forth fundamental component stuff. Memristors seem to have similar properties to magnetic cores and memory diodes.

What don't you buy about them being the fourth fundamental circuit type?

Its mathematically provable, proven in the 60's actually. Here watch this for a decent introduction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY

Well I can see resistors, capacitors and inductors as fundamental but when you beyond that I'm not convinced that a resistor with hysteresis is particularly more fundamental than an inductor with hysteresis (as in core memory) or a capacitor with hysteresis (not sure they've invented that yet) or a diode for that matter. The "we've discovered the forth fundamental component" stuff seems a little like hype to me. Not to knock its potential value for building computers.

I tend to agree with a comment elsewhere: if memristance is a fourth "fundamental" element of any importance, it would have had to be well-understood (and compensated for) as a parasitic property of other components. It's not, unless you count purely thermal effects.

I imagine that operating system, and my fear for rootkits is increased exponentially.

There's a huge difference between the lab and a production model.

Creating a memristor in a lab is step 1. Step 2 will involve creating them at scale and building out all new infrastructure since current OSes aren't designed to use them. Step 3 is to productize step 2 and put on store shelves. HP is doing step 2 right now with the result being a prototype for step 3.

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