HP is two and half years away from offering hardware that stores data with memristors, a new breed of electrical building-block that could lead to servers and other devices that are far more efficient than today's machines, according to report citing one of the technology's inventors.

As reported by The Register, at a recent conference in Oxnard, California, HP's Stan Williams said that commercial memristor hardware will be available by the end of 2014 at the earliest.

A company spokesman tells us that the company has not officially announced its plan for memristors. "HP has not yet committed to a specific product roadmap for memristor-based products," he said. "HP does have internal milestones that are subject to change, depending on shifting market, technology, and business conditions."

But Williams' remarks indicate that the introduction of the technology has been pushed back. Previously, Williams had said that memristor hardware would arrive in the summer of 2013.

"It's sad to say, but the science and technology are the easy part," Williams said at the recent conference. "Development costs at least 10 times as much as research, and commercialization costs 10 times as much as development. So in the end, research – which we think is the most important part – is only 1 percent of the effort."

Historically, electrical circuits were crafted with three basic building blocks: the capacitor, the resistor, and the inductor. But in 1971, University of California at Berkeley professor Leon Chua predicted the existence of a fourth: the memristor, short for memory resistor. Like an ordinary resistor, a memristor would create and maintain a safe flow of electrical current across a device, but unlike a resistor, it would "remember" charges even when it lost power. This would allow it to store information – i.e., serve as computer memory.

Memristor via electron microscope. Image: Wikicommons

Then, in May of 2008, HP announced that it had actually built a memristor, thanks to HP Labs Fellow R. Stanley Williams and others working in the company's research arm. Williams and team fashioned their memristor using the semiconductor titanium dioxide. The device, Williams said at the time, could provide a more efficient form of non-volatile memory – memory that can retain its information even when it loses power. According to Williams, it will significantly outperform flash memory – which is used today in smartphones, tablets, and even data centers.

"[The memristor] holds its memory longer," Williams said. "It's simpler. It's easier to make – which means it's cheaper – and it can be switched a lot faster, with less energy."

Recently, HP has partnered with a South Korean company called Hynix – an outfit that manufactures flash memory – to produce memristor hardware. But according to The Register, Williams has said that Hynix must play its cards carefully.

"Our partner, Hynix, is a major producer of flash memory, and memristors will cannibalise its existing business by replacing some flash memory with a different technology," he said. "So the way we time the introduction of memristors turns out to be important. There's a lot more money being spent on understanding and modeling the market than on any of the research."