71–80 of 299 posts
TLDR they are hyping up Memristors and hinting at HP trying to bundle it with some of their proprietary crap if/when they finally deliver.
You know a lot of programs that know how to use memristors?
It really is incredible, the innovation that comes out of these Silicon Valley startups!
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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.
There are other navigation apps that do store offline maps; the reason they're not popular outside of outdoor enthusiasts is that they take up a huge amount of space. It seems like a reasonable trade-off to me.
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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…
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.
So imagine the difference in an operating system that could retain its running image between reboots, and not have to distinguish things like stack/heap.
And could reconfigure more computing resources on the fly and back again.
It is... a very different view of computing. Exciting though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Actually, Google Maps allow you to cache portions of maps for offline use: https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/2650377?hl=en There are other navigation apps that do store offline maps; the reason they're not popular outside of outdoor enthusiasts is that they take up a huge amount of space. It seems like a reasonable trade-off to me.