HP invents something genuinely brilliant

Megaboffins at the HP Labs in Palo Alto have conjured up something that was theorised back in 1971 (by Leon Chua at UC Berkeley), a fourth basic element of electronics: the memristor.

A memristor works by altering its resistance between two states (read like a 0 or a 1), and retains the state when powered down. However, they do this very fast, DRAM-fast.

This technology has the potential to provide the speed of DRAM with the storage ability of non-volatile memory, gradually replacing both.

Since RAM would effectively become non-volatile, the risk of data loss through power failure would become almost negligible.

This could also spell doom for HDD, DRAM and Optical disk tecnologies – one at a time - although there is no set timeframe for this technology to reach our computers.