The first official HPQ memristor announcement was apparently in 2008, and at that time there was conjecture it would be used both as analog and digital recording media:

http://bit.ly/1fyBrWi

HPQ said in 2011 that they would have memristor products within 18 months:

http://bit.ly/rtVfno

In 2013, HP's Martin Fink was saying they would have memristor based HDD replacements by 2018. At that time, they claimed those 'early' memristors would be faster than FLASH, but not speed-competitive with RAM:

http://bit.ly/1RO05ke

Then in 2014, HP's Martin Fink was telling media that memristors would be faster than dram. He produced a chart showing memristors at 10 ns (no range) while dram technology ranged from 10 to 50 ns:

http://bit.ly/1fyBrWk

In October of 2014, HP's Martin Fink was saying they would deliver a 'clean sheet' operating system in 'The Machine' with 157 petabytes of addressable memory and 150 compute nodes by the end of 2016:

http://bit.ly/1fyBtO6

As late as December of last year, they were promising a 'Revolutionary' new operating system in 2015.

http://bit.ly/1fyBrWo

Now, there is supposed to be a show-and-tell prototype of 'The Machine' to be demonstrated sometime in 2016. It will not have memristors, and will run a slightly modified form of Linux. It is supposed to have 2,500 cpu cores and 320 TBytes of conventional RAM memory. That is about 500 times less memory than the 157 PBytes they were talking about last year. I am guessing without evidence that the processing distribution will be about 1250 Xeons with 20 cores in each, but really don't know. That amount of conventional memory suggests it won't be in a trade show, but will be in a controlled environment for invited guests, where HP can better control the message and defer all the questions:

http://bit.ly/1fyBtO6

Essentially, the point of all this is that HPQ has a long history of failing to deliver on and/or lowering the expectations of while pushing out delivery dates of announced products. There is no real reason that I can see to believe that HP Enterprise or whatever will suddenly establish the follow-through integrity that has clearly been lost in HPQ. Those fast/slow/soon/late/high yield/low yield memristors might never be available from a financial corporate descendant of HPQ.

I think there is a small fundamental flaw in the message HP is promoting about distributing their processors far apart from one another in an effort for each processor to be closer to local memory while having a seemingly contradictory flat memory model. That is that most of the tasks one would want to execute on such a machine would certainly be multithreaded. In many multithreaded tasks, parent threads need to quickly know when daughter threads have completed their tasks so that they can use these interim results to continue. The speed of light in glass fiber is typically about 2/3 that of light in a vacuum. It is reasonable to assume a typical thread process will execute (at maximum efficiency) at more than 6 billion instructions per second in the year 2020. So, let's say that a daughter thread is running 50 feet away (not physically, but as the optical cable bends) from a parent. This means that the daughter process could have executed over 450 instructions while the "thread complete" message is in transit to the parent (in addition to the overhead in more conventional architectures) and would have to wait out more than 450 additional instruction executions while waiting for the parent thread to begin issuing something new. Translated, the concept of 'The Machine' would lose its speed advantage in a programming environment where thread execution instruction counts are relatively low, such as the majority of in-memory database object manipulation.

In contrast to 'The Machine', successful architectures will, I think, increasingly move their processing cores together more akin to directions of the Nvidia Tesla, Intel Phi, and AMD FirePro, to name a few. Speculating further, massive amounts of memory may likely be arrayed spherically outward, perhaps on a 3-D radiant structure with cooling fluid [such as helium gas] running within the fingers. If each of these limbs comes with threading, contacts, and a seal system so it can be removed and replaced, then the mean-time-to-repair can be kept low.

My guess is that even though there has not been any disappointing news about 'The Machine' in over a month now, there will be a lot more as the dog-and-pony show that is supposed to occur late next year nears, and there will be more still prior to 2020