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

businessweek.com

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

#281

Post by trumbitta2 »

ars wrote: post #246
trumbitta2 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always thought water increases its speed when you shrink the pipe, not the other way around

> water increases its speed when you shrink the pipe Not exactly. It increases its speed when you shrink the nozzle . If you shrink the pipe and don't change the supply pressure the water will slow down. The nozzle is special because it's a transition from high pressure (inside the pipe) to zero pressure (the world outside). If you keep the flow rate of the water unchanged then shrinking the nozzle means the water mu…

thanks for the explanation, makes a lot of sense and my Physics seem to be rustier than I thought :D

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

#282

Post by regularfry »

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.

Platinum has a long history in industrial applications, often in surprising quantities. There's got to be a few orders of magnitude more of it in a catalytic converter than you would want on a chip die.

Titanium dioxide is better known as white paint pigment. Or sunscreen. People smear it on their skin in large quantities. It's not what you'd call scarce.

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

#283

Post by frik »

frik wrote: post #275
viraptor wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would movies and music really explode? Music hit the ceiling long time ago - nobody's going to go for higher resolution / sampling rate than the current "uncompressed" sound. Big publishers are intentionally sacrificing the quality for loudness anyway. 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…

Holographic movies require a high bandwidth and a lot of storage space (recorded/pre-rendered). Current holographic displays require a movie-source for every few-point. And to make it convincing for a small POV (e.g. 19" 4:3 holographic monitor) you need at least 8 few-points, for a 360° next-gen holographic display you would many terrabytes of data for one movie (and a high bandwidth to stream the data to the displa…

*view-point

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

#284

Post by tim333 »

mitchty wrote: post #240
tim333 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well I can see resistors, capacitors and inductors as fundamental but when you beyond that I'm not convinced that a resistor with hysteresis is particularly more fundamental than an inductor with hysteresis (as in core memory) or a capacitor with hysteresis (not sure they've invented that yet) or a diode for that matter. The "we've discovered the forth fundamental component" stuff seems a little like hype to me. Not to knock its potential value for building computers.

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

#285

Post by sp332 »

valarauca1 wrote: post #256
sp332 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't most the math just latex? So it could be rendered client side?

I mean the formulas are not very good at explaining the concepts. Sometimes it's helpful to have a picture.

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

#286

Post by bluedino »

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…

>> 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.

Isn't that fair since they are the company putting the R&D into it?

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

#287

Post by JackC »

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 patent incentives work this way. HP are not "the only people who are allowed to work on this problem." Patents don't forbid research, only use.

And patents stack: if HP has a patent on the general idea of memristors (for example), and you get a patent on a particular way of making memristors, then no one including HP can make them your way without licensing your patent as well as HP's patent. (This is different from copyright, where if I write the first Harry Potter story and you write a derivative Harry Potter story, I just own your story.)

The ultimate idea is when you sell something complicated like a car, a share of the money gets divvied up among a bunch of people/companies who contributed to it -- sort of like selling a movie, where royalties get divvied up among a bunch of people/companies who worked on it.

So, R&D incentives: right now HP doesn't have a commercially viable way of using memristors -- they have to invent a bunch of new stuff first. If someone else invents that stuff before HP can, that person/company will share in the megacash that comes from the breakthrough.

The part that is theoretically bad for R&D is that it's literally a gamble to research a particular topic, because whoever makes a particular discovery first wins all the royalties for that discovery. If you think HP's lab is way ahead of everyone else then you might not want to sink a bunch of money into memristors, because they might be about to patent whatever technique you start researching.

On the other hand, this means you ought to sink your research money into a different angle than HP is investigating, rather than just duplicating what they're doing. Your incentive is to find the highest-payoff place to put down your R&D bets, which (we hope) is a net win for everyone.

We talk a lot about the evils of software patents, but mostly that's because the model of "make a car and pay out royalties to people who helped" doesn't seem to translate/scale to software, so the incentive systems break. If you're coming from software you have to be careful translating your intuitions back to hardware, where the incremental-invention/royalty model is more workable.

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

#288

Post by gyom »

thom wrote: post #143
sp332 wrote: 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've never considered this, but the history of Wikipedia over the next 100 years might be an insanely valuable source of insight about culture.

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

#289

Post by andrewcooke »

oofabz wrote: post #257
andrewcooke wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can rearrange the inductor equation to get di = (1/L) dϕ. Then the quadrants are perfectly symmetrical except for the ugly 1/L. But that's just an arbitrary unit created by humans, you could fix that by defining the unit of inductance as the inverse of what we use now.

ah, thank-you. that makes more sense.

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

#290

Post by leishulang »

DelwinAmber wrote: post #62
valarauca1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll come down. Demand will be massive (if it lives up to the hype). This could potentially unify the RAM and Hard disks in computers.

There will always be a place for yet faster memory. Does this compete with the registers and L1/L2 cache in terms of speed?

it doesn't need to. If it's faster than the whole 'caching' procedure, than it is faster regardless.
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