Hewlett-Packard says that it has discovered that a new electric circuit developed by the company in 2008 has far greater potential than initially believed. First demonstrated as a resistor with memory, the "memristor" was then considered to be useful in high performance storage devices that can perform faster than flash memory. However, HP has found that the memristor can also perform logic.

HP now says that this technology can be used to develop a new type of chip that performs computation where the data is stored, rather than suffer a delay while it is fetched from other parts of the computer system. The company has in fact built a new chip, with multiple layers of memristor stacked on top of each other. HP believes that devices with memristor-based processors could be in the market in five years.

In a statement, R. Stanley Williams, senior fellow and director of HP's Information and Quantum Systems Lab said of this new technology, "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."

Moore's Law, as we know, predicts that the transistors that can be placed onto an integrated circuit will double every two year. In fact, a news report published on InformationWeek noted that this breakthrough could result in supercomputers being built that are "dramatically faster" than predicted in Moore's law.

For more on this story:
- check out the article at CNET News
- check out the article at InformationWeek

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