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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

#91

Post by jacquesm »

zevyoura wrote: post #84
jacquesm wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when is caching a substitute for integration?

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by integration; are you proposing that the mapping app contain the complete map data, which is then occasionally updated as needed? There's a clear advantage to not storing several GB of data you rarely if ever need on a device with very limited storage space.

Flash is a commodity, a typical navigation device will store all the maps for all of Europe including the most crazy little roads and cost a relatively small fraction of a cell phone, includes a good chunk of the hardware and comes with an SD slot for upgrades.

Cell phones could easily provide navigation capabilities for at least the country of origin of the buyer and several around it if the creators decided this was a desirable thing.

All of the US is 1GB. See here: (dutch):

http://www.laptopshop.nl/vragen/29528/115735/tomtom-navigato...

Flash runs a few $ / G. Of course your phone manufacturer will screw you completely on the memory when you buy it (the price difference between a 16G and a 32G phone is ridiculous, but I guess I can't fault them as long as people fall for tricks like that).

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

#92

Post by tootie »

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.

Creating a memristor in a lab is step 1. Step 2 will involve creating them at scale and building out all new infrastructure since current OSes aren't designed to use them. Step 3 is to productize step 2 and put on store shelves. HP is doing step 2 right now with the result being a prototype for step 3.

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

#93

Post by trebor »

colanderman wrote: post #86
mitchty wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the cool bit about memristors is that you could treat them like both a transistor for computation or for memory, or flip. Like an fpga. 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. E…

So imagine the difference in an operating system that could retain its running image between reboots What do you mean by this? This sounds like hibernation to me. not have to distinguish things like stack/heap I'm lost here too. This is a distinction that is made for purposes of program structure, not to kotow to demands of hardware.

Okay, imagine that to put your computer into hibernation mode all you need to do is hit the power button. This is instantaneous because none of the data has to be synced to permanent memory, because it's already in permanent, non-volatile memory.

I'm not sure what he means by distinguishing between stack/heap either.

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

#94

Post by valarauca1 »

colanderman wrote: post #86
mitchty wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the cool bit about memristors is that you could treat them like both a transistor for computation or for memory, or flip. Like an fpga. 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. E…

So imagine the difference in an operating system that could retain its running image between reboots What do you mean by this? This sounds like hibernation to me. not have to distinguish things like stack/heap I'm lost here too. This is a distinction that is made for purposes of program structure, not to kotow to demands of hardware.

It sounds like hibernation but it isn't exactly. Hibernation the ram is off loaded to the HDD and read back into ram on boot.

With this system your ram would be constant. You could pull the plug on your computer any time, and everything would still be there. It would start in the exact same state it was in before the power loss, no data loss, no corruption.

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

#95

Post by colanderman »

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?

Virtual memory doesn't exist solely to support swap files. It also allows any program to assume it's the only thing running (which simplifies assembly code) and enables memory-mapping of files and devices.

(Yes, you'll still need to memory-map files when we have memristors. They still won't necessarily be contiguous on disk, and they still won't necessarily exist locally.)

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

#96

Post by JoshTriplett »

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…

> Music hit the ceiling long time ago - nobody's going to go for higher resolution / sampling rate than the current "uncompressed" sound.

Spatial audio that supports dynamically computed surround sound for arbitrarily many speakers and headphones.

> 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.

1) High color depth, allowing bright and dim objects to coexist in the same picture without loss of fidelity, and allowing dynamic lighting.

2) Complete depth data, allowing dynamic depth of field changes.

3) Complete geometry and scene-graph data, allowing you to change the camera and perspective.

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

#97

Post by sp332 »

yeukhon wrote: post #52
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.

What's the issue with RAM disk to address your concern about "no disk"?

It's a lot of unnecessary copying. The data is already in RAM, but you "save" it to a different RAM location, in the RAM disk. Or if you do all your work directly on the file in the RAM disk, you have to deal with filesystem overhead constantly.

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

#98

Post by rogerdpack »

jacquesm wrote: post #47
valarauca1 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Plans are not products, but let's wait and see before we get all happy.

Yeah my thought too--I'll believe it when they actually release a product. It's like most research projects--initial results are great. Having it on the market means it really exists though...

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

#99

Post by boyaka »

jawns wrote: post #33

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 electr…

That made me think of a chinese finger trap.

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

#100

Post by sp332 »

fchollet wrote: post #28
valarauca1 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This means we might be able to make a literal version of the hitchhikers guide. All of human knowledge in your hand, no network connectivity needed.

All of Wikipedia (English) already fits on a smartphone with a 64GB SD card.

With no history and no pictures. It's useful, but it's not really "wikipedia" anymore :)
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