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With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

businessweek.com

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Re: With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

#31

Post by Synaesthesia »

valarauca1 wrote: post #13

A memristor is the 4th fundamental circuit component, along with capacitors, resistors, and inductors. The important part of memristors is that they can be arranged to form a crossbar latch, which acts like a transistor. This crossbar latches are very very small, and very low power. HP plans on achieving data density of 100GB/cm^2 [1] with read write speeds approximately 100x faster then flash memory while using 1% o…

Not only that but it has the potential to change our entire model of computing, and simplify it tremendously. The unification of storage and computing.

Re: With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

#32

Post by valarauca1 »

jacquesm wrote: post #29
valarauca1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they announced it cautiously back in 2006, popular science ran an article on it. They've done some press mainly with EE magazines since then. This technology has been in R&D for nearly a decade. I figure it pretty mature.

> This technology has been in R&D for nearly a decade. I figure it pretty mature. Funny, I read that the exact opposite way. If it was mature we'd be seeing products.

>Martin Fink, the chief technology officer and head of HP Labs, who is expected to unveil HP’s plans at a conference Wednesday.

Re: With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

#33

Post by jawns »

For those of you who are unfamiliar with what a memristor is, as I was, HP has an easy-to-understand analogy on its FAQ page about memristors:

"A common analogy for a resistor is a pipe that carries water. The water itself is analogous to electrical charge, the pressure at the input of the pipe is similar to voltage, and the rate of flow of the water through the pipe is like electrical current. Just as with an electrical resistor, the flow of water through the pipe is faster if the pipe is shorter and/or it has a larger diameter. An analogy for a memristor is an interesting kind of pipe that expands or shrinks when water flows through it. If water flows through the pipe in one direction, the diameter of the pipe increases, thus enabling the water to flow faster. If water flows through the pipe in the opposite direction, the diameter of the pipe decreases, thus slowing down the flow of water. If the water pressure is turned off, the pipe will retain it most recent diameter until the water is turned back on. Thus, the pipe does not store water like a bucket (or a capacitor) – it remembers how much water flowed through it."

Source: http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2008/apr-jun/memristor_faq.html

Re: With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

#34

Post by viraptor »

sliverstorm wrote: post #25
toomuchtodo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically when this technology comes of age we'll see smart phones reach the order of terabytes of storage. Looking forward to carrying the library of congress, netflix's entire catalog, and all of openstreetmap on my phone in the next 5 years.

Software grows to match the hardware. If storage goes up 100x, data will grow to accommodate. Some things won't grow, to be sure. Anything text-based, for example. But movies, music, pictures... would probably all explode in fidelity and thus size.

Would movies and music really explode? Music hit the ceiling long time ago - nobody's going to go for higher resolution / sampling rate than the current "uncompressed" sound. Big publishers are intentionally sacrificing the quality for loudness anyway.

Movies can practically scale up to retina-equivalent on wall-size equivalent only. Even then not many people will want TVs bigger than they can look at without moving their eyes...

Pictures could still grow, especially the internal raw representation taken from the light capturing element, but that's likely to be down-scaled when saving to kill noise.

What else is there that really takes space? (that is not limited by the effective resolution of human senses)

Re: With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

#35

Post by [deleted] »

sliverstorm wrote: post #25
toomuchtodo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically when this technology comes of age we'll see smart phones reach the order of terabytes of storage. Looking forward to carrying the library of congress, netflix's entire catalog, and all of openstreetmap on my phone in the next 5 years.

Software grows to match the hardware. If storage goes up 100x, data will grow to accommodate. Some things won't grow, to be sure. Anything text-based, for example. But movies, music, pictures... would probably all explode in fidelity and thus size.

[deleted]

Re: With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

#37

Post by aragot »

sliverstorm wrote: post #25
toomuchtodo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically when this technology comes of age we'll see smart phones reach the order of terabytes of storage. Looking forward to carrying the library of congress, netflix's entire catalog, and all of openstreetmap on my phone in the next 5 years.

Software grows to match the hardware. If storage goes up 100x, data will grow to accommodate. Some things won't grow, to be sure. Anything text-based, for example. But movies, music, pictures... would probably all explode in fidelity and thus size.

> Software grows to match the hardware.

You mean XML for instance?

Re: With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

#38

Post by markbnj »

sp332 wrote: post #23
cliveowen wrote: post #8

I so much want this to be true, I can't wait for it. Not having a layered memory architecture means no VM, everything has be rethought from the filesystem down. On a related note: "Operating systems have not been taught what to do with all of this memory, and HP will have to get very creative." Anyone knows what this could possibly mean?

Well, you wouldn't have to save files. You could just use a data structure in main memory because it's non-volatile. But how would you share data between programs when there's no disk? And you could execute binaries directly from storage without "loading" them into memory first. But you'd have to keep an original copy somewhere in case it modifies itself as it runs.

You'd probably still have memory partitioned into persistent areas and runtime heap of a sort, and you might very well continue to use the file system metaphor because it still makes sense to humans. Whether a file is bits on magnetic disk, in flash memory, or fast persistent RAM isn't all that meaningful to the user. As for sharing, I don't see why this would be an issue. If you have to move memory contents between machines then you still need some sort of external transport, whether it is a network, or a glowing glass cube.

Re: With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

#40

Post by squigs25 »

Soooo... this is basically just persistent memory right?

HP has been working on the memristor since 2008. Memristors have already been produced in labs by U of Michigan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor

This article seeks to give the image that this is a novel idea that investors can take advantage of. In reality, it is not.

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