Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

businessweek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 299 posts

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

#231

Post by melloclello »

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?

> Fink has assigned one team to develop the open-source Machine OS, which will assume the availability of a high-speed, constant memory store. Another team is working on a stripped-down version of Linux with similar aims; another team is working on an Android version, looking to a point at which the technology could trickle down to PCs and smartphones.

I was hoping for a second there that somebody at HP had read about Loper OS and Stanislav Datsovskiy's ideas[1], or even about Symbolics LISP machines (great article on the frontpage today[2]), but nope, looks like they are just gonna repeat the same insanity of the past fifty years instead of actually doing something that will progress the field of computing.

[1] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7878679

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

#232

Post by tim333 »

walshemj wrote: post #149
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…

the first computer I worked on a PDP11/40 with core memory retained state when powered off :-)

Funnily enough the memristors seem to have much the same way of working as old core memory. I'm not sure I really buy the forth fundamental component stuff. Memristors seem to have similar properties to magnetic cores and memory diodes.

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

#233

Post by aidenn0 »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #228
aidenn0 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The name comes from the 1971 paper from Leon Chua.. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=108333...

Yes, but referring to varying resistance metal-oxides as memristors is much more recent (2008ish I think) and is still somewhat controversioal.

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

#234

Post by danelectro »

jacquesm wrote: post #192
danmaz74 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

I think I get what you're going for now, sorry it took a while for the coin to drop. Just like a battery can look like a capacitor under some conditions it really isn't a capacitor. Capacitors and batteries can be described using the same basic laws, even though the fundamental mode of operation is completely different. They have the same basic properties: - internal resistance - a certain capacity - a breakdown volt…

An electrolytic capacitor is an electro-chemical device itself. Also, like a battery, if the "electrolyte" is not without solvent then it is a liquid-state device. As opposed to a film & foil capacitor which is a solid-state device. Batteries generate a characteristic cell voltage as a result of a chemical reaction. Capacitors store any voltage up to their maximum rating, electrolytics have higher capacity/size ratio than film & foil due to the chemical help of the electrolyte, but do not generate voltage on their own, only store what is supplied from a power source.

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

#235

Post by Keyframe »

sp332 wrote: post #100
fchollet wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

I remember reading about Xowa and there was stated that English wikipedia requires 25GB and images additional ~80GB which you can all download and access offline with Xowa. Considering there are 128GB SD and micro SDXC cards readily available for ~$100... that's actually amazing.

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

#236

Post by mcintyre1994 »

JohnBooty wrote: post #177
figglesonrails wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Would this really be fast enough to do away with cache completely? A 100x speedup from main memory to L1 cache sounds pretty low, although I don't have any figures to back that up. If this is slower than L1 will there not be a major performance drop to the point we'd have to use at least some cache still?

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

#237

Post by colanderman »

sp332 wrote: post #187
colanderman wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pag…

That's assuming you already have a file and know how big it should be. Or does it take the whole space for one file, and every program on the computer shares the space?

Files can be both sparsely and dynamically allocated.

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

#238

Post by XorNot »

mindslight wrote: post #226
jacquesm wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big problem is that your two terminal battery powered op-amp circuit would (1) sooner or later run out of battery power and (2) would have to exhibit it's memory function through some 'ordinary' memory device. If we're going to use 'ordinary' memory devices anyway then the whole exercise is moot. What exactly drives 'M' is the billion dollar (and probably many billions of dollars) question... It's more like the c…

Yes, either linear memory devices like C/L, or creating digital memory cells out of positive feed back hysteresis. Running out of battery is just one of the limits of the abstraction. I mean it as a mental exercise in demonstrating that one can easily build a circuit that fulfills the equation of a memristor - does its mere emulated existence make it interesting? Why aren't these "emulated memristors" (obviously with…

Every effect is linear if you constraint your domain enough.

But you are right - the real news is more that we've got a new way to manufacture some type of memory storage element (that's also conveniently fundamentally tiny).

It is definitely not the only way though: IBMs been working on magnetic racetrack memory for some time which would have many of the same advantages.

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

#239

Post by XorNot »

hatu wrote: post #148
LaikaF wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is starting to sound like a Version Control type solution where you just update your Wikipedia every now and then and it merges the new info.

I ended up looking into this a little while back as an emergency kit type thing. Wikipedia is useful - and tells me how to do a lot of things. In a disaster, I probably don't have internet. So it would be a good idea to have local wikipedia.

Zim reader was the best I could do, and still is the best at the moment. But I would be totally fine with dedicating a few terabytes to keeping much more complete local archives on my file-server if the update process was reasonably automatic (something like bittorrent would be great).

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

#240

Post by mitchty »

tim333 wrote: post #232
walshemj wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the first computer I worked on a PDP11/40 with core memory retained state when powered off :-)

Funnily enough the memristors seem to have much the same way of working as old core memory. I'm not sure I really buy the forth fundamental component stuff. Memristors seem to have similar properties to magnetic cores and memory diodes.

What don't you buy about them being the fourth fundamental circuit type?

Its mathematically provable, proven in the 60's actually. Here watch this for a decent introduction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY

Post reply on HN