Thanks for the memory
HP have managed to produce a new (or perhaps old) type of semi-conductor device, called a memristor, the theory of which was originally proposed forty years ago. One of the novel features is that it can store, or remember, the state of charge it had when the power supply was turned off. This potentially offers new ways of making device memory. As a BBC article suggests this may make it possible to build computers that boot up almost instantly. The writer gets a bit carried away though when s/he adds that it could also mean "mobile phones that can last for weeks without needing a charge." The catch, of course, is that for many devices the primary use of power is not for storing information, flash memory solved that problem years ago, but for other areas of operation such as colour displays, and principally in the case of mobile phones, the transmitter. Memristors aren't going to help you make a call with a flat battery.
In fact, the main benefit of memristors may be in the last part of the article, where it is suggested that they will eventually be used to produce the switching function of transistors, but can be made smaller, and presumably, lower power.
Just returning to the 'static memory' idea, and fast booting laptops, it makes an interesting story when linked to some recent articles on a so far largely academic security threat, whereby researchers have found that it's possible to extract encryption keys from a computer's memory for up to ten minutes after the computer has been switched off. They have demonstrated a USB key-based application that can be used to boot the computer and take a dump of the memory and extract the key. Of course in the future memristor based memory will make this attack very much more practical with data being stored long term in memory. I suspect that this will lead to a change in security designs, with such features as boot from removable devices being disabled by default, and options to purge memory on shutdown, which will obviously offset any advantage of memristors in this area. Marvellous thing, technology.
