TimN #fundie

TimN #fundie eetimes.com

[Comment on an article talking about HP implementing the 4th passive circuit element]

Very interesting - too late the save the planet though, with all that "now proven" unecessary leakage current out there. Now we just need the evolutionists to admit their theories are wrong too, hopefully that will be 30 rather than 2000 years

26 comments

old comment by Frank

This is in reference to the Memristor or Flux Capacitor (seriously), which is a newly synthesized electrical circuit element.

Short version: It's a resistor whose resistance can be changed by changing its charge. So it acts like a variable resistor except that instead of looking like this:
image
It's a nanowire that looks like this:
image

So basically TimN is going back to the old fundie thing that if someone just turns the world of science upside down y making a huge discovery that science must be wrong. So his point, such as it is, is that since a lot of people were wrong about Memristors being possible that we must also be wrong about blithely ignoring the possibility that only performing the proper blood drinking ritual every week can save us from an angry god hurling us into a lake of fire for sins that we literally never committed.

-Frank

old comment by cyborgtroy

Um.....

Anyway...

The so-called memristor changes its resistance when current flows through it.

by pushing current through one way, its resistance will decrease, and the other, increase.

In order to read the memory, an AC voltage is applied so that the resistance is not changed by the reading process. Then it is a simple matter of determining how much current is flowing to derive a 0 or a 1.

Since the memory is based on an atomic effect rather than digital circuits, it is non-volatile. It also uses less power than regular DRAM, which must be constantly refreshed to avoid losing bits.

What this means really, is that a computer based on memristor RAM could instantly hibernate without shutting down the operating system or writing any data to disk. Booting would also not require any memory operations.

Memristors may be capable of replacing hard drives as well, and flash drives, as they have similar properties to flash memory, but don't need to be erased to set data bits, and have a much higher density.

It's basically the same thing that happens every few years - Something crazy happens, power consumption goes down, storage goes up, processing goes up, die size shrinks - Oh yeah, they're going to use them to build even smaller transistors.

Um, but it has nothing to do with leakage current or evolution, or 30, or 2000.

old comment by Princess Rot

I think what Timmy is doing is confusing a discovery in efficiency of memory electronics with global warming, since current memory chips generate a lot of unnecessary charge from constantly needing to be refreshed so they don't lose data. The new memory is based on atomic effect, like cyborgtroy said, rather than electronic, so it uses less power.

Somehow Timmy has wound up blaming global warming on excess circuit charge and the fact that scientists were previously wrong about the new type of memory being possible. He's trying to say that if scientists are proven wrong on one thing, then everything else must be wrong too, and tries to tie it in with his beliefs about evolution. Like most creationist fundies, he completely mangles every subject that comes his way.

Oh Lard, I'm a geek.

TimN #fundie eetimes.com

26 comments

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