lunes, 12 de abril de 2010

HP claims big jump in computing design

San Francisco Business Times - by Patrick Hoge
http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2010/04/05/daily84.html?ed=2010-04-09&ana=e_du_pub
 

Hewlett-Packard Development Co. says it has discovered a new way of storing and processing information that could fundamentally change the design of computers. The discoveries allow for faster processing than Moore's Law suggests is possible in smaller spaces and requiring less power.
The discoveries were detailed this week in a paper published in the journal “Nature” by six HP researchers. Their key finding is that "memristors," tiny electrical circuit elements that HP demonstrated exist in 2008, can perform rapid computations on the same chips where data is stored and can retain information even without power.
Memristors use less energy, can store more information in the same space and are resistant to radiation, which can disrupt transistor-based technologies, HP said in a press release.
Palo Alto-based HP went so far as to suggest that memristors could replace silicon on screens like those on e-readers, or "one day even become the successors to silicon on a larger scale."
“Memristive devices could change the standard paradigm of computing by enabling calculations to be performed in the chips where data is stored rather than in a specialized central processing unit," said R. Stanley Williams, senior fellow and director at HP's Information and Quantum Systems Lab. "Thus, we anticipate the ability to make more compact and power-efficient computing systems well into the future, even after it is no longer possible to make transistors smaller via the traditional Moore’s Law approach.”
Memristors could allow for handheld devices that offer ten times greater embedded memory than exists today, or power supercomputers that allow work like movie rendering and genomic research to be done "dramatically faster than Moore’s Law suggests is possible," HP said. Moore's Law, described by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, argues that the number of transistors that can be on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years.
The company said it has created "development-ready architectures" for memory chips using memristors could come to market within afew years.
Leon Chua, a University of California, Berkeley, professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department, first theorized about memristors, which he named, in an academic paper published 39 years ago. Memristors, he said, also exist in human brains.
“Since our brains are made of memristors, the flood gate is now open for commercialization of computers that would compute like human brains, which is totally different from the von Neumann architecture underpinning all digital computers,” said Chua, referring to the seminal work in computing by John von Neumann.