This is a stupid article. The author makes the assumption that HP and Hynix COULD ramp to high volume production, however it is clear from HP's statement that this is not true:
"As with many other ground-breaking technologies being developed at HP Labs, HP has not yet committed to a specific product roadmap for memristor-based products,"
Let me also say that I worked in the non-volatile memory business for seven years. Any organization that can scale better than its competitors will do so, unless they don't like making money. End of story. If HP and Hynix are not ramping to high volume, it's because they are not ready, not some stupid conspiracy theory that they want to stagnate the development of cloud-buzzword "technology".
Ah, a breath of fresh sanity from someone who knows the industry. That is very welcome, thank you.
The semiconductor industry is brutal in general. Selling to consumers is worse, but the worst by far is the part that sells any type of memory. Forget the conspiracy theories. This space is full of dead companies. Someone will eat you.
>The semiconductor industry is brutal in general. Selling to consumers is worse, but the worst by far is the part that sells any type of memory.
Really? Because there have been all kinds of price-fixing scandals and accusations for the last 2 decades... Price fixing does not sound very cut-throat to me...
The only DRAM price fixing scandal that I know of is the one from 1998 to 2002 which gave the involved parties litigation on their backs up until 2010. If you know of any others, please let me know. Google did not turn up anything else.
Anyway, I want to explain why the DRAM world is brutal:
Samsung: Eating everyone
Hynix: Almost breaking even
Qimonda: Dead
Micron: Making money
Elpida: Bankrupt
Nanya: Losing more money than it makes
Powerchip: Barely alive with 0.1% market share
ProMos: Has sold its fabs, soon to be dead
Etron: Alive, but with less that 0.1% market share and 15 cent loss per dollar sold.
Winbond: Now only in specialty DRAM
So, Samsung and Micron are doing well, Hynix is barely OK and the rest are sunk. Yes, I believe that the DRAM competition is fierce and brutal.
I worked in the non-volatile memory business for seven years.
Then I'd be curious to hear what you know/believe about memristors in general. To me they sound super exciting but there have been dismaying indications of vaporware (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4231367) and this latest postponement is consistent with that.
I do not have enough information to say what exactly is the problem with HP's memristor. The axiom of technology development in NVM is:
"The technology of the future will always be the technology of the future."
Just like cold fusion has been 5 years out for a long time. I know that is cynical, but the truth is flash keeps scaling and the new technologies are not cost effective compared with silicon flash.
evolution > revolution
The second link did a good job of summarizing the technologies that existing companies are pursuing. Most of these companies would like to have a two terminal element (resistor) over a three terminal element (transistor) if they could. It requires less space. When one of them finds a way to make it cheaper than flash you will see it on the market.
What's the advantage of memristor-based storage, exactly?
If it's cheaper to make, then sell storage at a price that undercuts the competition but still makes a better profi.
If it's more reliable, then sell storage at a higher price with a better warranty.
There's no sensible scenario where memristors are ready to go but they don't want to sell any memristor products yet because it will hurt existing sales. Either they can make a better product, or they can't, and if they can't make a better product then the stuff simply isn't ready.
They are probably delaying to get their profit out of existing investments in tool and die for their factories, as well as high inventories.
While all the manufactures are likely not in cahoots, it's probably like the airline industry where they look to the left and right and nod at each other and change fees right after each other.
Also notable how hard drive prices have not dropped even though supply is completely back to normal.
Storage can be as reliable as you want, you only need to throw parity at the problem. Flash is one of the most unrealiable technology today, chips are ofter rated at only 10000 writes before bit-errors, flash is used as storage today thanks to advanced Error-correction (ECC) algorithms. BTW spinning hard-discs also use ECC since many years ago but it is much less powerful.
The advantages of memristor technology are many. In ordinary conventional non-volatile storage it offers densities higher than flash and speeds approaching SDRAM. I'll let you work out the implications of that on your own.
That doesn't necessarily help. For any technology there will be a price vs. expected sales volume curve and thus a sweet spot that maximizes revenue. It's possible that people have looked at enough numbers and figured out that the interaction between the demand curves for memristors and for flash is such that they can more easily maximize revenue by delaying memristors.
For example, pricing memristor based drives exceedingly high will still likely put them well within the price range of ultra high-end flash based enterprise level drives (such as card based multi-terabyte SLC based drives), and so will still result in a canibalization of flash sales.
They're talking about delaying commercialization from a year out to sometime farther. There's no way they have a year's worth of flash products sitting in inventory.
It's not only products siting in inventory. It's also:
1) products sitting in store fronts and retail, that will be unsold if they announce something new.
2) Investments (in the billions) they have made for flash production. You don't just kill all the money you have invested to build a flash plant because there's a new better technology. Not if you can delay the introduction of said technology until those costs are absorbed, and the investments have paid for themselves.
3) materials they have ordered for flash production. Volume deals to manufactures for metals and the like can run not just one year ahead but several.
Selling the old stuff for a while is not even about price-fixing, if you think at this level, it's something natural that benefits all companies involved.
They all have: factory stock, retail stock, investments in flash technology and volume orders on materials to absorb before making the jump.
This all strikes me as an example of a sunk-cost fallacy. Either memristors will make more money, or they won't. If they will, it doesn't matter that you have a billion dollars invested in X that won't be useful anymore, because you've already spent that money. If memristors won't make more money than making flash products using existing infrastructure, then it's not ready for commercial use and there's no conspiracy behind the delay.
This is very clearly not the sunk cost fallacy. In this case, they are delaying making money (thanks to collusion + patents most likely) and they are still going to recoup their currently 'sunk' costs.
The sunk cost fallacy is continuing to put money into something explicitly because you're counting the previously sunk costs instead of justifying it by "the remainder to be spent < the expected return value." In this case, that's not the calculation that's being made at all.
>This all strikes me as an example of a sunk-cost fallacy. Either memristors will make more money, or they won't. If they will, it doesn't matter that you have a billion dollars invested in X that won't be useful anymore, because you've already spent that money.
That's nothing like the "sunk cost fallacy". For one, in the sunk cost fallacy you cannot get your "sunk costs" back.
But those companies CAN (and will), sell their old flash tech stock.
>There's no sensible scenario where memristors are ready to go but they don't want to sell any memristor products yet because it will hurt existing sales.
It's not about existing sales, it's about stock. If you have built a lot of stock of traditional devices (including materials and infrastructure for manufacture) while waiting for memsistor tech to be ready for prime time, you want to sell it first before you put out the new products in the market.
But surely, competitors will jump right in, right? Unfortunately, there are that many players. Similarly, they can't "undercut the competition" because there is no competition, just a few players that "understand" each other.
Storage/memory manufacturers have had a few price-fixing scandals over the years.
According to Wikipedia, "(March 23, 2012) A team of researchers from HRL Laboratories and the University of Michigan announced the first functioning memristor array built on a CMOS chip for applications in neuromorphic computer architectures." - this technology is two-three years away from being available in consumer packages.
You should expect to be able to purchase something (for more than the equivalent flash package would cost you) in 2015-2016. If they play out the way they should, the price/performance slope should cross over with flash around 2017-2018.
These new technologies usually take about 10 years to come online at volume. No conspiracy required.
Where do you draw the line if they didn't? If everyone was allowed to submit whatever title they wanted, it would quickly degrade into Digg-quality submissions. In rare circumstances, it is necessary to change titles. A piece of content might not have any title at all, so needs one. It is better for the health of HN that mods act on the conservative side.
It was replaced because the original title was perfectly fine, and your version was a bit editorialized. I'll grant that you provided a good summary, but the "revolutionary" word is an adjective. Some people, including myself, would not find memristors to actually be revolutionary. They are an important technology advance, but that is all. Penicillin was revolutionary, as was the Magna Carta. The word is too-oft used for things that really are not revolutionary at all.
A lot of people think memristors have the potential to change computing in fundamental ways (requiring new architectures) and bring forth true AI. I'd call it revolutionary.
The idea that memristers will bring forth true AI is just silly. It's all just turing complete computation, and the blocker on true AI right now isn't about speed. Otherwise we could still run it, just slower. And not actually that much slower, for that matter.
And that new architectures would be required is only interesting if you're a breathless industry press reporter. New architectures are required all the damn time for all sorts of things. Intel, AMD, and nVidia all pump them out on a yearly frequency, give or take a bit depending. Flash drives, even without memristors, are going to rearchitect "the cloud" in the next couple of years. Architectures flow like water in this industry.
Memristors have the interesting property of adapting their resistance over time as current flows through them. Thus they can mimic Hebbian learning, a fundamental property of synapses, in a way that other electronic components, cannot easily do.
No one knows what the architecture of the first AI will look like. However, our current architectures have a big problem (for creating AI) in that they have a very clean separation between data and code. Code is run in the CPU and alters data on RAM and disk. Brains don't work this way -- there is no separation between data and code. For this reason I think memristors -- while not a silver bullet -- might represent a step in the right direction.
"However, our current architectures have a big problem (for creating AI) in that they have a very clean separation between data and code."
That's a security measure, rather than a fundamental property of transistors. We had to add that property to our architectures.
Simulating Hebbian learning isn't that difficult with transistors and conventional computation, so you don't get that big an advantage right now. If we were brushing up against the fundamental limits then it would matter, but we're a ways away from that yet.
I haven't seen any lab demonstrations of multi Mbit devices. Until we see that this is years away from production in my experience as a device physics researcher. All storage technologies so far have taken 10 years plus to have large market share and I don't see this as an exception.
Could they not charge a premium price for memristors early on to prevent flash cannibalization and then bring the price down as they transition their output?
Thats what I thought too. I did think they were going to have a sufficient difference to flash that they would be able to compete in a different way. The HPC market is the classic start point.
However, I think there may be other reasons. Maybe they haven't worked out the connection architecture properly?
Does HP have patents here that would prevent others from introducing this tech? Or are they/Hynix simply the only ones with experience with the tech to pull it off? This is such a clear example of one of the fears spelled out in The Innovators Dilemma it isn't even funny.
Edit: whoops, mtgx says Samsung is also in this space, so it sounds like patents can't be an obstacle, or at least until the suing starts.
1 - They delayed this because of manufacturing problems and want to save face
2- They really are that stupid and gave a competitor a 1 year head start (or they made a Gentleman's Agreement - but it wouldn't prevent even another competitor getting in)
3) They feel they are far enough ahead of competitors that they can afford to "drain the pipeline of flash based products" and still come out ahead in memristors ultimately.
I agree a purposeful delay in order to try and squeeze some drops out of existing stock / sunk costs would be risky, and likely stupid. Clearly no corporation has ever made short-sighted, stupid decisions like that before so this would totally be a first :)
I'll believe memristor tech when I see commercial products of it available. I don't think it's far fetched that a company is slow to shift it's mainstay, profitable business product to an unproven new technology that has no mainstream commercial products out yet. Cutting edge tech is always rife with delays and shortcomings that weren't anticipated until the rubber actually hit the road.
While many in these comments are touting "double storage & reliability for the same price", that would be for raw manufacturing costs, not including all the R&D money and the cost of fabrication plants that must be built or retooled. It is highly unlikely consumers will see those benefits anytime soon.
I don't see why this is a big deal. It's a year, so what? We've waited decades, a year isn't going to hurt anything. Hynix is a big business that is heavily invested in flash and it takes a lot to completely change the core of your business over, especially when you have to possibly build new fabs and fab technology.
Sure, but making plans for a million dollar data center based on nebulous timelines and an unproven technology shouldn't be happening anyway. Your point about it being better is true, but the opportunity cost of going with the known right now is essentially zero.
Where do you get "for the same price"? I can assure you that even if memresistors cost 1/10 to produce the equiv in other tech they would hit the market at 10x the price. Better tech can get a higher price and as long as the ability to provide market demand is limited by patents or the cost to convert/build fabs then the supplier gets to set the price.
Seems like a lot of people in this discussion failed Econ 101.
Hynix (2nd largest memory chip maker after Samsung) and friends were fined just a couple years ago for price fixing memory, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10126755. If competition isn't a problem, why waste money on costly innovation?
This catchy headline is essentially saying that company X is going to watch their growth and expenditure and maximise their profits in a manner which won't benefit consumers.
The headline is interesting because it's stating the obvious, standard business practice but possibly they have hit on the only way to glam up the incredibly boring story of 'product will be delayed by 12 months'.
What short-sighted thinking. This is why you don't see much innovation from the big companies usually. This is like Apple thinking they shouldn't release the iPad because it would cannibalize their Mac sales. Instead of being an also-ran in flash, Hynix/HP could be the leaders in memristors. But it seems you won't see them thinking like that.
Oh well, I guess Samsung will take the lead in that market, too, then, since I think they were the other main company working on memristors.
An LOL at "this is why you don't see much innovation from the big companies" followed by a what-if-Apple-did-this example. Apple is a big company. The biggest.
The article is B.S. If the release of this technology will replace all RAM, Flash memory, and other memory storage technologies as the author expects, they wouldn't need to delay it.
And lastly, if you believe the article, it says it's not in HP's control anyways. It's the manufacture partner Hynix fault.
>An LOL at "this is why you don't see much innovation from the big companies" followed by a what-if-Apple-did-this example. Apple is a big company. The biggest.
And a LOL for misunderstanding his point.
He said that "this is why you don't see MUCH innovation from the big companies", not "why you don't see ANY" innovation.
And he used Apple precisely as a _counter_example_ to that lack of innovation, saying that what HP did would be like a hypothetical Apple saying they won't release the iPad because that would cannibalise iPhone sales.
>It only makes sense to continue selling the older, higher margin products until a competitor comes up.
If you're the only one on the market with memristors the margin is determined by whatever the market will bear, and if they're really that much better than existing technologies it will be much larger.
None of this conspiracy stuff makes any sense. They're delaying a year because they can't manufacture the product.
When I first heard of HP's memristors, I was looking forward to them using it in the TouchPad, to really compete against Apple. Now this. FAIL all around, HP.
"As with many other ground-breaking technologies being developed at HP Labs, HP has not yet committed to a specific product roadmap for memristor-based products,"
Let me also say that I worked in the non-volatile memory business for seven years. Any organization that can scale better than its competitors will do so, unless they don't like making money. End of story. If HP and Hynix are not ramping to high volume, it's because they are not ready, not some stupid conspiracy theory that they want to stagnate the development of cloud-buzzword "technology".