Before you go out and buy a fancy and expensive new computer with an SSD and a bunch of DRAM inside it, take a minute and listen to HP explain how they're going to have a new technology competing against flash memory in a year and a half, and they're planning on rendering DRAM and SRAM obsolete by 2015.

This new technology that HP is betting on is called the memristor. Memristors are wires made of titanium dioxide a mere 150 atoms wide, and when an electric current is passed through them in a particular direction, the resistance of the wire changes. This is all you need for computer memory: the ability to write a one or a zero (with a current in one direction or the other), and the ability to read the state of the wire (by measuring the resistance).

Like conventional solid state (flash) memory, memristors can store data without using any power. Memristors are also relatively easy to manufacture using existing technology, and HP has been "running hundreds of wafers through the fab." In other words, this is not a science project, it's a commercial product.

The advantages of memristors are that their read times are about 10 nanoseconds, with write and erase times of 0.1 nanosecond. Data stored in memristors lasts years, and you can read and write them about 1,000,000,000,000 times (HP is still counting) without data loss. In a nutshell, we're talking about increasing storage density by a factor of two, increasing speed by a factor of ten, and decreasing power consumption by a factor of ten, all at the same price point as flash memory is today.

HP says that it should have a version of what they're calling ReRAM (Resistive Random Access Memory) on the market by 2013 to compete with conventional flash memory. And over the next few years, they'll be rolling out memristor-based versions of both DRAM and SRAM, which ought to speed up computers immensely. HP is not the only one working on memristor technology, either: Samsung has been working on the same thing, so we can all keep our fingers crossed that some healthy competition will make this stuff affordable soon after it's released.