HP Labs says it’s found the missing link that would create computers that don’t forget, don’t need to boot up, consume less power and associate information like the human brain does.

It says it’s proven the existence of a previously only theorized fourth fundamental circuit element in electrical engineering called a “memristor,” a combination of “memory resistor,” that can retain a history of the information it’s fed.

The findings were published Wednesday in Nature.

HP said the breakthrough could supplement and eventually replace DRAMs, which “forget” when the machine loses power and has to reboot to retrieve the data from the disk needed make it run.

A memristor would retain its information when the machine is unplugged.

HP reflected that it could advance cloud computing, lowering the power demands of the cloud’s huge bank of servers and insuring greater reliability and resiliency.

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