This article from Ars Technica talks a little bit about memristors and HP's plans for "The Machine". The original plan was for The Machine to demonstrate this technology, but HP ended up removing feature after feature (including memristor technology) before it's release. They quote John Sontag from HP in the article:
"The simplest way to think about it is this—take a DRAM DIMM out, and put a memristor DIMM in,” said Sontag. “You now have another pool of memory that’s denser and nonvolatile. It’s a new class of memory—the consequence for operating systems is that moving stuff around from I/O devices [to and from disk] becomes unnecessary."
But what they watered it down to (and not delivered on that either) seems to be roughly equivalent to that fancy flash memory you can buy now for the new intel chipsets.
It's unclear to me if the problem was a lack of vision on the part of HP or if the technology they came up with has fundamental problems that prevent it from being practical. Either one seems plausible.
"The simplest way to think about it is this—take a DRAM DIMM out, and put a memristor DIMM in,” said Sontag. “You now have another pool of memory that’s denser and nonvolatile. It’s a new class of memory—the consequence for operating systems is that moving stuff around from I/O devices [to and from disk] becomes unnecessary."
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/hp-la...