Congrats to Everspin on their IPO filing, made public today.
I can’t say anything in the quiet period, so I’ll just point to some earlier musings on “memories” – those in our head and those in our computers. It seems that the developmental trajectory of electronics is recapitulating the evolutionary history of the brain. Specifically, both are saturating with a memory-centric architecture. Is this a fundamental attractor in computation and cognition?
The new technologies that we have invested in (Everspin’s spin-torque MRAM (which uses a permanent magnetic field to store digital data), Nantero’s carbon nanotubes, Coatue/AMD’s nano-filaments) are non-volatile rad-hard memories that should be faster, smaller, cooler, cheaper and more reliable than the current SRAM and DRAM kludges for a digital memory store.
But stepping back to see the big picture, we have entered the era of computing where the vast majority of all transistors manufactured are memory, not logic. Even for Intel, which thought it had exited the memory business. The focus of Moore’s Law will bifurcate, and memory architectures will become the main vector of progress.
As a former chip designer, I am struck by the evolution of these different “memories” – those in our head and those in our computers…
The cortex is relatively new development by evolutionary time scales. After a long period of simple reflexes and reptilian instincts, only mammals evolved a neocortex, and in humans it usurped some functionality, such as motor control, from older regions of the brain. Thinking of the reptilian brain as a “logic”-centric era in our development that then migrated to a memory-centric model serves as a good mental model for the future of AI.
Jeff Hawkins: “The brain does not ‘compute’ the answers to problems; it retrieves the answers from memory… The entire cortex is a memory system. It isn’t a computer at all.”
From original post: https://www.facebook.com/jurvetson/posts/10155157096445611 and
more detail: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/8185844122/
And from 2005: http://jurvetson.blogspot.com/2005/01/thanks-for-memory.html
Company: https://www.everspin.com/mram-technology-attributes
IPO: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSFWN1BL0RU?feedType=RSS&feedName=governmentFilingsNews
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