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

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

#151

Post by valarauca1 »

danielweber wrote: post #133
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…

Are they teaching memristors in college these days as a fundamental component, or is it still too new?

They are in higher level classes. My EE friends knew what they were instantly

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

#152

Post by danmaz74 »

jacquesm wrote: post #145
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…

Interesting tidbit: a while ago, I was talking about memristors with a physics trained person. And he told me something that really stuck: It is impossible to make an inductor (coil) without resistance and without capacitance. It is impossible to make a capacitor without some inductance and a little bit of leakage. It is impossible to create a resistor that does not have self-inductance or a bit of capacitance. If yo…

Interestingly, this is exactly what the chief of HP labs said in this video [1]: That lots of papers noted the effect and talked about anomalies, but no-one made the connection to the memristors before them. He also says that the effect is only really noticeable at nano scales (because it needs incredibly high electric fields).

EDIT: on second thought, that's not the case, because the HP memristor is not a memristor in the sense of the of the original paper describing it - it has nothing to do with the magnetic flux. It can only be described with the same set of equations, so, it behaves like a memristor, but is not "actually" a memristor that completes the set [2]. That is, if I understood the video correctly (but I think I did, as the speaker himself talked about a "trick" in the beginning of the video).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor#mediaviewer/File:Two-...

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

#153

Post by maxerickson »

jerf wrote: post #115
JoshTriplett wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the…

"Spatial audio that supports dynamically computed surround sound for arbitrarily many speakers and headphones." Still covers only a small arbitrary constant factor of data that is already very small by modern standards. Note that surround sound data is, IIRC, already not "twice" the size of stereo. And your video points 1 and 2 are also still at most only small constant factors of increase over what we already have,…

Isn't having a computer process some data and zoom in on a portion of it 'using of data beyond the rate at which our senses can convey information to our brains'?

I guess you are talking about the utility of media at higher and higher fidelity and I am just snagging on how you have phrased it.

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

#154

Post by Touche »

biot wrote: post #142
Touche wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the predecessor to xml that was easier to read?

"If GML was an infant, SGML is the bright youngster who far exceeds expectations and made its parents too proud, but XML is the drug-addicted gang member who had committed his first murder before he had sex, which was rape." -- Erik Naggum GML is from the late 1960s and is, arguably, easier to read. SGML from the 1980s expanded upon this. XML is essentially just an offshoot of SGML and much less readable than SGML is…

I'm confused, why does anthology have a closing tag but the other elements do not?

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

#155

Post by jacquesm »

danmaz74 wrote: post #152
jacquesm wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting tidbit: a while ago, I was talking about memristors with a physics trained person. And he told me something that really stuck: It is impossible to make an inductor (coil) without resistance and without capacitance. It is impossible to make a capacitor without some inductance and a little bit of leakage. It is impossible to create a resistor that does not have self-inductance or a bit of capacitance. If yo…

Interestingly, this is exactly what the chief of HP labs said in this video [1]: That lots of papers noted the effect and talked about anomalies, but no-one made the connection to the memristors before them. He also says that the effect is only really noticeable at nano scales (because it needs incredibly high electric fields). EDIT: on second thought, that's not the case, because the HP memristor is not a memristor…

Nice to see confirmation of that theory from that high up.

It seemed extremely logical to me when I heard it the first time and like everything else, in retrospect it is blindingly obvious.

I'd hate to see a memristor dropped into a circuit design and being handed the task of 'fixing' spice to produce the correct output. But by the looks of it the usefulness of individual memristors will be quite limited.

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

#157

Post by perlgeek »

Arjuna wrote: post #82

Dr. Leon Ong Chua [1] wrote this paper [2] in 1971 entitled, Memristor - The Missing Circuit Element , where he first outlined the theory of the memristor . Admittedly, this is not my field, so my fascination may appear to be quite naive to the well-initiated, but I find it simply intriguing that the memristor was first theorized to exist; that is, it is somewhat analogous to the Higgs boson, in that the mathematics…

Another thing that has been predicted by theory first was the laser: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser#History

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

#158

Post by aidenn0 »

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…

Note that other companies had been working on switched resistance crossbar latches with metal oxides before HP, they just didn't have a fancy name for it.

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

#159

Post by markbnj »

melloclello wrote: post #69
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…

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.

It might be. I'm not arguing that it is the ultimate best metaphor to use, but these things do tend to be adopted organically and become very entrenched.

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

#160

Post by colanderman »

sp332 wrote: post #97
yeukhon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or if you do all your work directly on the file in the RAM disk, you have to deal with filesystem overhead constantly.

Not so. Take a look at the Linux kernel implementation of memory-mapped ramdisk files. There is no "filesystem overhead". Zero. The kernel pretty much sets up the page mapping and then is hands-off.

Even if your memory mapping is backed by a file on a block device, the only overhead is occasional paging to disk. This happens on the order of SECONDS… not "constantly"!

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