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HP memristor ...in perspective
IEEE Spectrum online. Again, IBM appears all over the news. One of the main misconceptions of SyNAPSE is that, imagining of course the 3 companies involved in SyNAPSE succeed, the resulting chip will automatically result in better "MRAPs, UAVs, Mars Rovers". This is of course not true. A very dense neural chip is 1/2 of the story. The ingredient that SyNAPSE needs to succeed is having meaningful neural models implemented on the chip. And this is where the other 1/2 of the competition will lie in the long (7 years) program.
The Pentagon's mad science division is in a hurry to start making brains-on-a-chip. According to DARPA's recently-released budget, the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) program isn't set to being until the next fiscal year. But the agency is already ramping up preparation for the program, which promises to "develop a brain inspired electronic 'chip' that mimics that function, size, and power consumption of a biological cortex."