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

Post by comboy » Thu, Jun 12, 2014, 1:58 AM UTC

mbell wrote: post #241

achille wrote: 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

Any idea if their materials have changed? He speaks of Platinum and Titanium Dioxide as the materials they are using. Even discounting the cost of spinning up the necessary fabrication facilities, I would think such materials would keep the costs prohibitive for mass adoption.

Post by jessaustin » Thu, Jun 12, 2014, 2:11 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #201

swimfar wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reminds me of the missing mechanical equivalent of the capacitor, the inerter, which McLaren secretly began using on their formula one cars in 2005. But does this mean there's potentially another missing suspension component? http://personal.strath.ac.uk/yixiang.xu/talk_HUST_2008_Chen.... edit: Assuming a Force-Current, Velocity-Voltage equivalence, I get the mechanical memristor behavior to be: dx=M.F.dt, with…

v = M.F => that's regular inertia isn't it? In the case of the inerter presumably constrained by the stroke of the device. It's like a 'two stroke flywheel' in a nice package.

Post by chatmasta » Thu, Jun 12, 2014, 2:26 AM UTC

ohitsdom wrote: post #249

haberman wrote: post #193

> “If you want to really rethink computing architecture, we’re the only game in town now,” he said. Another way of putting this: because of patents, we're in a privileged position of being the only people who are allowed to work on this problem. So instead of the whole world rushing to make something interesting with this new tech, we get a group of people working in an ivory tower trying to come up with the perfect…

I don't think it's a patent issue so much as a question of resources. Sure, Google, Apple, Microsoft and others have the resources to develop a similar machine, but a new type of computer would wipe out their business model in a much more devastating manner than HP. HP has the resources, but also isn't enjoying too much success to scare away this risk.

Post by oofabz » Thu, Jun 12, 2014, 2:54 AM UTC

andrewcooke wrote: post #203

frik wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conceptual symmetry between the resistor, capacitor, inductor, and the memristor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor#mediaviewer/File:Two-... The scales fell from my eyes. Now the electronics math makes sense - Memristor was the missing puzzle piece.

what an awful diagram. it implies there's some kind of symmetry that relates all four, but when you look at the details there are asymmetries. if you think it was helpful look at it again and explain why di appears in two quarants but dq and dv appear once each.

Post by grrowl » Thu, Jun 12, 2014, 3:02 AM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #14

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…

> Basically when this technology comes of age we'll see smart phones reach the order of terabytes of storage. Looking forward to carrying the library of congress, netflix's entire catalog, and all of openstreetmap on my phone in the next 5 years.