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If you asked me to explain what a memristor is without using the words "memory" and "resistor", I probably would have said something very close to this sentence in the article:

>The new architecture does without transistors entirely, relying on a bulk material property change to switch bits from a low-resistance to a high-resistance state.

So what's the difference between Intel's 3D Xpoint and memristors?

Maybe there's no difference ? maybe they want to play the stock market, because for memristors, they might have competition, for example from crossbar inc ?
The memristor patents might be an issue as well.
Maybe intel mostly licenses the tech from crossbar, and just scales the production ?
They may be using some other process to manipulate the properties of the media in question. Good old fashioned solid state physics to the rescue I guess. It just saddens me that HP borked the whole memristor fabrication issue with their Machine project (a non-von-Neumann architecture would be fun to toy with).
It could be the way Intel is layering the memristors.

>From there, memory cells are layered in an intricate three-dimensional checkerboard pattern that Intel researchers say is 10 times denser than conventional memory.