Live data from Hacker News

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

businessweek.com

171–180 of 299 posts

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

#171
They talk about memristors being the fourth type of circuit element and the final element at that.

It's just a resistor with memory. i.e. its R value can be changed by current and remembered. Wouldn't an inductor with memory in the sense that it's L is changed by voltage or current and remembered be a fifth and a capacitor with a C that is changed and remembered be sixth?

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

#172

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.

Can't reply to your other comment yet, so I'll do it here. I think that this is a "duck typing" memristor: You can use it as a memristor, but it's not what was predicted. Anyway, if you're interested, watch the video I linked (thanks to @achille): It really explains what this is all about. If you have some basic understanding of semiconductors physics I think you'll enjoy it :)

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

#173
post #143
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Weird side point, but I'd be really interested to hear how people weight the importance of Wikipedia text vs media vs history. For me the first is 99% of the point, but clearly others feel differently.

Yeah, you're probably right. But the history can be really important on certain pages. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671756 And images can make some of the math articles useful since they are too-often dense pages of formulas.

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

#174
post #143
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Weird side point, but I'd be really interested to hear how people weight the importance of Wikipedia text vs media vs history. For me the first is 99% of the point, but clearly others feel differently.

I find that Wikipedia's text heavy presentation disappointing especially considering that the articles are almost exclusively what I would consider extremely terse. It's like the worst of both worlds.

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

#175
post #4

I encourage folks to watch this tech talk by HP Research Labs on the discovery of the memristor and implementation details. It goes into the gory technical details, from the low level physics to the construction of the gates, the truth tables, and the high level computation possibilities once chips are assembled in a crossbar package. > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY

Thanks for the video! It should be the first comment for this thread. I... retweeted it :)

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

#176
post #58
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software grows to match the hardware. You mean XML for instance?

Not sure why he was downvoted, xml is a trade off for developer convenience. A trade off we were willing to make because we had disposable bits.

XML's only real problem is the dumb idea of requiring closing tags to have the tag name. Otherwise it'd be just as fine as, say, JSON:

  b
  "A":"B"
And maybe one can get upset about the entity encoding and other extra aspects. But those aren't really why XML feels so large.

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

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that but it has the potential to change our entire model of computing, and simplify it tremendously. The unification of storage and computing.

Unification of storage and computing...what does that even mean? I get that having nearly unlimited, fast, persistent storage would be awesome, but that's not a conceptual merging of storage and computing -- but I definitely agree about the simplification.

Because processors are now so many orders of magnitude faster than main memory a huge percentage of their transistors and complexity are allocated to things like caching, prefetch, and branch prediction.

Those features that are the only things saving modern processors from spending nearly all of their time doing nothing useful while they're waiting for data to be retrieved from main memory.

Look at a Core i7 CPU die, with the L1/L2/L3 cache circled. Understand that many of the remaining transistors are doing things like branch prediction, managing cache coherency, and prefetch and so forth.

  http://i.stack.imgur.com/4Z1nU.png
Now imagine that all of those resources could be doing actual processing instead of simply caching gobs of data that already resides in main memory.

That would be awesome.

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

#179
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You work it out from the schema - if it is not ambiguous you can omit it.

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

#180
post #78

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.

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…

I imagine that operating system, and my fear for rootkits is increased exponentially.
Post reply on HN