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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

#161

Post by danmaz74 »

jacquesm wrote: post #155
danmaz74 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See my edit to the previous comment - now I actually think that the symmetry isn't proven by HP approach (but this doesn't make it any less interesting/promising).

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

#162

Post by colanderman »

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.

And you could execute binaries directly from storage without "loading" them into memory first.

Linux already does this. Program code is cached copy-on-write in shared memory. The fact that, say, bash has to be loaded from disk once is pretty much irrelevant. After that, the kernel's just managing pointers.

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

#163

Post by __david__ »

Touche wrote: post #154
biot wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

The same reason has a closing tag but does not: HTML is SGML where certain tags can be made optional. XML specifically did away with this and made all close tags mandatory (even on contentless tags, which is why xhtml requires you to do ).

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

#164

Post by jacquesm »

danmaz74 wrote: post #161
jacquesm wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See my edit to the previous comment - now I actually think that the symmetry isn't proven by HP approach (but this doesn't make it any less interesting/promising).

For it to be an actual memristor it would have to be. Really curious about what it is that they will be unveiling.

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

#165

Post by AnimalMuppet »

radicalbyte wrote: post #122
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…

So storage is 1x10^6 larger, and read/write speeds are 1x10^2 faster. So it'll take 1x10^4 times as long to copy the capacity.

I'll take that tradeoff in exchange for 10^6 larger capacity, any day.

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

#166

Post by cmaggard »

radicalbyte wrote: post #122
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…

So storage is 1x10^6 larger, and read/write speeds are 1x10^2 faster. So it'll take 1x10^4 times as long to copy the capacity.

It will take 1e4 times as long to completely fill that device proportionally to an older one, yes, but that's still two orders of magnitude faster than it would be to fill that equivalent amount of space with the older write speed.

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

#167

Post by Touche »

__david__ wrote: post #163
Touche wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The same reason has a closing tag but does not: HTML is SGML where certain tags can be made optional. XML specifically did away with this and made all close tags mandatory (even on contentless tags, which is why xhtml requires you to do ).

Just to be clear, are some closing tags optional or are all closing tags optional? If the former, how do you know which?

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

#168

Post by magicalist »

scott_karana wrote: post #147
eropple wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't that disappear in some recent version? I had to use some special keyword search term to make that happen in the newest Maps.

It did disappear. And fortunately, they've added it back again, in yet another UX interaction. https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/3273567?hl=en

that's the interaction groby_b just described

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

#169

Post by hoprocker »

radicalbyte wrote: post #122
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…

So storage is 1x10^6 larger, and read/write speeds are 1x10^2 faster. So it'll take 1x10^4 times as long to copy the capacity.

If you're making comparisons based on physical displacement, sure. But it's probably more helpful to think about how fast it will copy an equivalent number of bits, and from this perspective it actually will, indeed, take 1x10^-2 the time of flash storage.

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

#170

Post by meepmorp »

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 think it's funny to see people quoting Erik Naggum, though perhaps that's just because my context for him is largely his rather prolific and fiery output on usenet.
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