HP has been working on memristor technology for years. It played with Hynix in 2010 and came up with a new class of computing device based around the technology, The Machine. Meanwhile

SanDisk was working on ReRAM products and thought that HP's memristor know-how could be key.

The pair are now combining their efforts in a long term partnership to get in early to what has become known as the Storage Class Memory (SCM) market.

Martin Fink, HP's chief technology officer was excited to be working with SanDisk as it had an understanding of the significance of this challenge, and more importantly share a vision that the solution lies within Memory-Driven Computing.

"Together, we plan to bring new memory solutions to market and accelerate adoption in the enterprise, while simultaneously advancing HP's development of The Machine to enable a new computing model over the long term."

Commercial, large-capacity ReRAM products may be a few years away at present, the two companies have also agreed to work on datacentre-centric solid-state drives (SSDs) built around more traditional NAND flash modules.