Steve's Blog
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Memristors
March 19 2011
If your partial to a bit of science you might be interested that to keep advancing in speed, the transistors in our computer chips will soon become atomic in size and so small that quantum fluctuation will make them unstable. Put simpler they'll get so small that it will be impossible to make them work.
It's predicted that this will happen in 2017, so what next for comupters?
Two things, memristors and quantum computers, both proven to work and both mind boggling in how they'll change the game. Since the memristors are the ones that we're going to see in the relatively near future it's probabaly the best one to look forward to.
Memristors are a direct alternative to transistors as a gateway for electrical current. They're simpler to build but also remember their last actions. This means that we have one technology that can be the CPU, hard disk and RAM all at the same time. Having a tower PC will be pretty pointless and will all of a sudden look as out dated as a 90's mobile car-phone. This technology is very real and should reach the mass market in the next decade.
I personally can't wait for my computer to be the size of a watch, though I'm not sure that it will beat the one I had as a kid which could change the TV channels!