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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

#61

Post by jacquesm »

LaikaF wrote: post #55
jacquesm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd need the network connectivity anyway just to stay 'in sync'. But in off-line mode life would be a lot easier.

It could reduce the amount of data a smartphone needs. I'd like to keep a copy of my local area in my google map and then have it check in once a week to look for changes.

A smartphone could have an onboard map today. It's a conscious choice by google to make it work the way it does. Look at TomTom or any other navigator (and possibly some smartphone apps too) that come with integrated maps.

That service is just grafted on there, it's not a necessity.

It's the google way of doing things.

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

#62

Post by DelwinAmber »

valarauca1 wrote: post #18
higherpurpose wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume the initial prices will also be 10x more per GB than what we have now, too, much like SSDs and flash storage in the beginning (it's still the case actually) - compared to flash storage that is - so 100x more per GB than HDD storage.

It'll come down. Demand will be massive (if it lives up to the hype). This could potentially unify the RAM and Hard disks in computers.

There will always be a place for yet faster memory. Does this compete with the registers and L1/L2 cache in terms of speed?

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

#63

Post by DelwinAmber »

squigs25 wrote: post #40

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.

There's a huge difference between the lab and a production model.

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

#66

Post by angersock »

grinich wrote: post #26
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.

We'll think about media in a completely different way when this happens.

No, we'll just use the same shitty car and theft and property analogies.

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

#67

Post by DelwinAmber »

sp332 wrote: post #49
markbnj wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Filesystem semantics are a bottleneck. Fusion IO had to get rid of them when they demoed their billion-IOPS platform last year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3434711 For communicating data between programs, would you create a filesystem object that points to memory inside your program, or what?

Yes. On Linux it's /dev/shm and it is a ramdisk that you can access from multiple processes.

IPC (Inter-Process Communication) is a known technology. This won't change it much if at all.

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

#68

Post by noobermin »

viraptor wrote: post #34
sliverstorm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think my argument is that we will find new things to store on our PC's similar to how we found new stuff to store on our PC's from the 90s till now.

I guess it is hard to imagine, but let's dream a bit...one ridiculous possibility that I've thought about is consider something like google glass. Imagine recording every moment of your day from your smart phone, and not just when you wake up. Why would you do this? Well, may be there for little things like having a meeting with someone and you want to remember details without writing it down. Why take the time to record it manually when you have the ability to do it in HD, for cheap?

Again, this is hard to imagine wanting to do especially for privacy reasons, but were things like facebook and twitter easy to imagine in the 80s? As things things have changed, so have social norms...I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, I'm just stating an observation.

So, I happen to not have any HD vids on my laptop at the moment, but I have a normal video on my laptop that is 10 minutes long that is 70 MB. For something like recording video for 10 hours say, that's 6 * 70 * 10~4GB. So, yeah that's about 250 days (little less than a year) on your smart phone at 1 TB ignoring all other things (full seasons of vids of shows, as another commenter mentioned, stuff like raw gps data that could be added to the video, other things), so may be it isn't quite reaching the limit but it's a good example for how as we have more space for stuff, it is possible to imagine finding more things to fill your smartphone's new TB of storage with.

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

#69

Post by melloclello »

markbnj wrote: post #38
sp332 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Continuing to use the file-system metaphor (Instead of, I don't know, anything else, perhaps some kind of global namespace with built-in versioning like Urbit's) seems like lobotomising this incredible new paradigm before it is even born.
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