HP set to release NAND flash replacement in 18 months
Exec tells IEF audience that Memristor chip developed with Hynix remains on schedule — A Hewlett-Packard senior fellow this week told attendees at the International Electronics Forum 2011 in Seville that his company …
Context & Ripple Effects
HP's announcement lands in the middle of a bruising stretch for the company: the next-generation memory race already had IBM clearing technical hurdles in June 2011, and HP itself has spent the past month absorbing the fallout of Léo Apotheker's departure, the $10.3 billion Autonomy acquisition, and a tablet effort widely panned against the iPad. A senior fellow telling the International Electronics Forum in Seville that the memristor chip developed jointly with Hynix is still on schedule gives HP a rare piece of credible technology news.
The claim matters because it is specific: an 18-month window to commercialize a NAND flash replacement, backed by one of the world's major memory manufacturers rather than a lab demo. That puts HP and Hynix among the first movers trying to turn memristor research into shippable silicon.
First-order effects
- HP gains a flagship hardware story at a moment when its credibility has been dented by the TouchPad withdrawal and management churn, while Hynix secures a differentiated product line beyond commodity NAND.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent NAND producers such as Samsung and Toshiba would face a new competitor attacking their core market from outside the standard flash roadmap, pressuring pricing and R&D priorities if the 18-month timeline holds.
Third-order effects
- If memristor-based memory scales commercially, the boundary between fast volatile DRAM and dense non-volatile flash begins to blur, reshaping how system designers architect storage hierarchies and potentially shifting value toward whoever owns the new process technology.
The trend: Memory vendors are racing to move past NAND flash with new non-volatile technologies, turning next-generation memory from lab research into a competitive battleground.