Expanding its footsteps in the realm of cloud and storage, HP is on the verge of unlocking the secrets of “Memristors“, the missing link in electronics. It is actually a fourth fundamental circuit element meant to replace currently prevailing flash memory and even inspire computer systems that work more like the human brain. This is really exciting as with this development, HP is moving closer to brain-like computing!

These memristors are a combination of resistors with memory, with the ability to ‘remember’ the total electronic charge that passes through them, will be able to act like synapses within electronic circuits – mimicking the brain’s network of neurons. Isn’t this really interesting? Memristors are also the basic components of electronics, alongside resistors, capacitors and inductors, and are believed to replace DRAM and even hard disks.

Giving information on memristers, their structure and working, HP’s Stan Williams said,

“With the information that we gained from the present study, we now know that we can design memristors that can be used for multi-level storage. That is, instead of just storing one bit in one device, we may be able to store as many as four bits.”

While this is a really big development, HP’s been extending its strategy across several initiatives, spanning cloud computing, hardware and software.  In the last week of April, the electronics giant  has landed yet another high-profile contract with NASA. This deal includes among others personal computing, which is also the central focus of HP and NASA’s latest contract.

But not all of HP’s initiatives were ready for prime time.  Earlier this month, Scott McClellan, who’s also the interim vice president of engineering for HP’s new cloud services initiative, spelled out several of the company’s internal plans on his public LinkedIn profile. This also gave an idea about HP’s intentions and plans to penetrate the cloud market.

The leaked profile informed about the HP’s object store service being built from scratch, using a different language than its compute, networking and block storage pieces. All these developments collectively point to only one direction and convey that HP clearly lines itself up to compete with top cloud services, it seems Amazon is a target as well.

Last, but not the least, though the electronics giant is actively pitching into storage and software market, we are glad to know that it has still the direct customers under its focus. It recently launched multiple new business laptops which seem to be sharing a border with more consumer-sided devices, as a part of its effort to get into higher margin areas, both in the cloud and hardware space.