Arm Wrestling with the Future?

There are a number of reports floating around today about a new electronics device that holds great promise for reducing circuit size, efficiency, and reliability. It is touted as the new technology which will allow Moore's Law to be extended for another thirty years.

HP Labs reports that a memristor, a theoretical device proposed by Leon Chua of UC Berkeley in 1971 has been realized by R. Stanley Williams' lab at HP.

The memristor — short for memory resistor - could make it possible to develop far more energy-efficient computing systems with memories that retain information even after the power is off, so there's no wait for the system to boot up after turning the computer on. It may even be possible to create systems with some of the pattern-matching abilities of the human brain.

Wikipedia has a good discussion of this new device.

Now, I wonder whether this latest gee whiz device will live up to its billing. If past experience is any guide, there's maybe a 20% chance that all this hoopla is deserved. But that means there's an 80% chance that it will fizzle. Of course you expect that in a few months the fog will life and we will know the truth. In reality, the truth probably won't be clear for 3-5 years. Things always take more time than you expect! It is only in retrospect that you get that gee whiz feeling about how fast the future in on-rushing. For those of us living through "exciting times" it all feels rather banal.