When it comes to new technology, I guess the first thing that comes to my mind is a discovery made by HP Labs earlier this year. Computer technology has grown so much over the past twenty years. Chips are so much faster and far smaller. The problem we are reaching now is that we may finally be nearing the limit to which we can make these chips smaller. This leads us to the need to look for another way to accomplish making the chips smaller and faster. Finally, Hewlett Packard has unveiled a new piece of technology that they believe “the way solid state memory is created and stored could have just changed forever” (Fruhlinger, 2008).
This bit of technology is being the the memristor, or the Memory Resistor. It gets it's name from a mathematical theory 40 years ago, that stated the circuit should consist of this fourth element. Finally, 40 years later it was proven that it does exist. What does the existence of the fourth circuit element mean though?
Most computers use a binary system consisting of 1s and 0s to interrupt values and carry out whatever function it is set to do when a certain value is presented. These new chips will allow the storage and retrieval of a vastly large array of values. In this, they are comparing it to biological synapses. AI technologies would be far more accurate, useful, and interpret things almost as quickly and fluently as human beings would.
Although this has many years down the road before implementation can be seen, there are some uses that should be seen coming out in the next few years. This discovery for circuits means that it could enable PCs to no longer have to boot up, to where they can be turned on instantly. Data storage would be able to far surpass what we now have!
One thing that it can do for us now, is vastly help out with the DRAM and the hard drives that we have running in our computers today. The research team over the memristor anticipates the first form of this being used in the next few years as a sort of cache between the hard drive and the DRAM. Currently the way they are setup, the data is stored on a slow high capacity hard drive and loads it into the fast DRAM, which takes time on booting up and loading large files. With the cache in between, the hard drive would be able to have memristor remember key data and transfer it far faster to the DRAM, thus, enable super fast boots and loading of files! Eventually they even plan to replace both with one memory unit.
What big question that is on mine and many other peoples minds is how this really truly affects our future for computers. Is this the missing element that will now make it possible to make robots and androids that can think like humans? Such a scary concept, and the answers could possibly be even scarier. Our current CPUs are digital, and the “logic” behind its decision making is pretty poor with its - yes/no, 1 or 0 - way of coming up with an answer. The CPUs could be redesigned with the memristor to act more with an analog approach, and "associate information in a manner similar to that of the human brain” (Lugmayr, 2008). This will allow the CPU to interpret subtle changes in many different aspects and being about to process those changes with varying answers instead of a simple yes or no. So many people are saying that this could possibly lead to the creation of a brain that works just like a human being does sometime in the future.
With all the new technologies out, this one is by far the most exciting one I have found and been following.
For the full story you can visit HP Labs.
