Ready or Not, Memristors Are Coming

As soon as the fusion reactor comes on-line . . . .

This is the component needed to build analog neural networks. The costs are going to have to come way down to make it economical. Right now the process can be done much more cheaply using digital technologies.

The rule of thump for microchip pricing is that "the first chip off the assembly line costs $100,000, all the rest are free." While that's an oversimplification, it does point out the truth of chip making: all the 'real' cost of the chip is in the R&D, once it's ramped up to production, the materials are dirt cheap, either from the cost of the base material (silicon is the second most common element on the planet, after carbon) or from the miniscule amounts required per chip (gold wires the size of a human hair, and a fraction of a millimeter long? you could add hundreds to a chip for less than five cents). Things haven't ramped up to full production yet, so all we see on the market right now is the 'first chip off the line.'

When dealing with things like TV's and Computers, you see the prices stay relatively stable, because each new model is being packed with MORE circuits and MORE features as the cost of making 'something as powerful as last year's model' drops.

You want to see progress? go buy the cheapest USB stick you can find, It'll cost a buck or two, and hold something like 2-4GB of data. Five years ago, the cheapest USP stick you could find cost a buck or two, and held 512MB-1GB of data. And even THAT old, 'too small to be useful' 2011 USB stick holds orders of magnitude more memory than was used by all of NASA to put Apollo 11 on the Moon!