The concept of a division of labour is known for its efficiency in the economic world but as we scale down to electronic departments and components, it is evident that there is also the inevitable existence of the loss of energy and time in the transfer of information and the shuffling of data between processor and memory chips.
In a seemingly persistent continuation of these chips since the past couple of years, there has been a recent interesting breakthrough encouraged and researched by Singapore and Germany where a new chip termed ‘RERAM’ (resistive random-access memory) has been developed.
Underselling this concept - though not quite as fast as the best micro-processors - it is capable of switching from computing to data storage sufficiently well for it to be installed in devices. In addition, it may be capable of so many features beyond a conventional chip.
Of course, all this is in a developmental or initial stage, but it seems this could be a fast coming innovation that could be more efficient to be used in most of our daily use appliances like smartphones, washing machines or laptops.
A very exciting prospect is that of appliance developers now breaking free of the chains of the need of transferring information to devices in binary forms.