Tech sites and blogs are buzzing with the latest innovation out of HP Labs. Sought after for 30 years, the group has finally cornered the science to make the memristor a reality. It's significant because for decades, three building blocks governed the capabilities of integrated circuits.

HP give us this short history lesson:

The memristor first appeared in a 1971 paper published by Professor Leon Chua, a distinguished faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department of the University of California Berkeley.

Chua described and named the memristor, arguing that it should be included along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor as the fourth fundamental circuit element. The memristor has properties that cannot be duplicated by any combination of the other three elements.

Although researchers had observed instances of memristance for more than 50 years, the proof of its existence remained elusive - in part because memristance is much more noticeable in nanoscale devices. The crucial issue for memristance is that the device' atoms need to change location when voltage is applied, and that happens much more easily at the nanoscale.

Now that nanoscale sciences are advancing, the memristor joins the fold and the impact to IT can be significant. There's already talk employing the technology as a possible replacement for DRAM. This layman-friendly article discusses how the technology can help drive up energy efficiency in the data center:

One application for this research could be the development of a new kind of computer memory that would supplement and eventually replace today’s commonly used dynamic random access memory (DRAM). Computers using conventional DRAM lack the ability to retain information once they lose power. When power is restored to a DRAM-based computer, a slow, energy-consuming “boot-up” process is necessary to retrieve data from a magnetic disk required to run the system.

In contrast, a memristor-based computer would retain its information after losing power and would not require the boot-up process, resulting in the consumption of less power and wasted time.

This functionality could play a significant role as “cloud computing” becomes more prevalent. Cloud computing requires an IT infrastructure of hundreds of thousands of servers and storage systems. The memory and storage systems used by today’s cloud infrastructure require significant power to store, retrieve and protect the information of millions of web users worldwide.

Memristor-based memory and storage has the potential to lower power consumption and provide greater resiliency and reliability in the face of power interruptions to a data center.

Remember, building out that 24/7, all-encompassing "cloud" is going to take a whole lot of data centers...