14 DAY TRIAL // Now that DDR4 has been officially announced and the standard has been finalized and it is published as we reported here, we can move on to a unique technology that has not been mass-produced before, but will revolutionize the performance of our computers, tablets, smartphones and servers.
HP Labs, the research division of the company, has perfected the memristor concept together with SK Hynix and now the technology is readily available so that any foundry could manufacture it if it had access to HP’s IP.
The two companies have reportedly decided to postpone launching of products based on it to late next year as this would apparently eat into Hynix’s current product lines and will cannibalize its own market.
The memrisor is already commercially available in Micron’s phase change mobile memory chips, but this is a somewhat different implementation of the same concept.
The advantages of the memristor concept are impressive as the technology could practically build SSDs that are much faster than today’s NAND-based devices while bringing impressive durability.
Durability is the most important issue SSD makers are facing this year and we explained that here.
Most SSDs using 25nm NAND have a rated durability of 3,000 or 5,000 program/erase (P/E) cycles, which translates in a lifetime of 5 to 10 years of daily usage.
A storage device using memristor technology is rated at more than 100,000 P/E cycles, thus making it at least 20 times more durable than today’s NAND, and durability is currently the most pressing issue in SSD industry.
ReRAM is a memristor implementation that focuses on speed and performance rather than quantity as ReRAM has the potential to replace today’s DRAM and offer the same speeds, but without the inconvenient of being completely erased when the power is interrupted.
Being able to revolutionize both, the DRAM and the SSD / NAND markets, memristors are very important to the IT world right now.
HP and SK Hynix’s announcement that the technology is ready and will land on the market next year is certainly going to cause some waves.