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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

#291

Post by haberman »

JackC wrote: post #287
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 d…

> Patents don't forbid research, only use.

From what I have read patents disallow others from doing commercial research unless that research falls inside a narrow exception. The exception covers getting regulatory approval for a drug, or for "amusement", but not for other commercial purposes. The exception is specifically disallowed if the research can further the alleged infringer's legitimate business. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_exemption

> 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.

I am almost certain this is not true:

"Most countries' legal systems seek to protect both [original and derivative] works. They grant authors the right to impede or otherwise control their integrity and the author's commercial interests. Derivatives and their authors benefit in turn from the full protection of copyright without prejudicing the rights of the original work's author." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work

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

#292

Post by mzs »

DelwinAmber wrote: post #60
Synaesthesia wrote: post #31

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.

CPU's may end up looking more like GPU's with thousands of registers.

or with very few registers per thread on die with the rest in storage ala TMS9900

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS9900

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

#293

Post by charonn0 »

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

If I understand this right (I'm not an electrical engineer) a hypothetical memristor-based computer would not need discrete RAM and disk storage nor would it have a fixed processing power. Rather, the chip of memristors would simultaneously be acting as the CPU and as non-volatile primary memory with the speed and efficiency of DRAM (or better). Additionally, the number of memristors dedicated to computation vs. storage could be changed in real time on a live system.

This absolutely blows my mind.

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

#294

Post by aperrien »

danmaz74 wrote: post #152
jacquesm wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting tidbit: a while ago, I was talking about memristors with a physics trained person. And he told me something that really stuck: It is impossible to make an inductor (coil) without resistance and without capacitance. It is impossible to make a capacitor without some inductance and a little bit of leakage. It is impossible to create a resistor that does not have self-inductance or a bit of capacitance. If yo…

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…

You can produce memristors on the macro scale[1], in fact, it appears that any pair of oxidized conductive metals will work[2].

http://sparkbangbuzz.com/memristor/memristor.htm[1]

http://youtu.be/rvA5r4LtVnc[2]

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

#295

Post by CamperBob2 »

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

I tend to agree with a comment elsewhere: if memristance is a fourth "fundamental" element of any importance, it would have had to be well-understood (and compensated for) as a parasitic property of other components. It's not, unless you count purely thermal effects.

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

#296

Post by sriku »

jacquesm wrote: post #145
jawns wrote: post #33

For those of you who are unfamiliar with what a memristor is, as I was, HP has an easy-to-understand analogy on its FAQ page about memristors: "A common analogy for a resistor is a pipe that carries water. The water itself is analogous to electrical charge, the pressure at the input of the pipe is similar to voltage, and the rate of flow of the water through the pipe is like electrical current. Just as with an electr…

Interesting tidbit: a while ago, I was talking about memristors with a physics trained person. And he told me something that really stuck: It is impossible to make an inductor (coil) without resistance and without capacitance. It is impossible to make a capacitor without some inductance and a little bit of leakage. It is impossible to create a resistor that does not have self-inductance or a bit of capacitance. If yo…

For me, the "discovery" of memristors felt strangely like predicting a fundamental particle based on known symmetries, where one of these symmetry slots has not yet been observed.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eightfold_Way_(physics)

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor

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

#297

Post by Houshalter »

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.

This is already somewhat feasible and someone is actually working on it: http://memkite.com/blog/2014/04/01/technical-feasibility-of-...

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

#298

Post by Houshalter »

sushirain wrote: post #268

The biggest difference the memristor brings is to Machine Learning. The memristor is a first step towards a hardware implementation of Hebb's rule - "neurons that fire together wire together". Hebb's rule variants are used in machine learning algorithms to do things like web-search, image/object recognition, etc. (Specifically, Hebb's rule can be used to compute PCA.) It's interesting to note that the brain does not…

I don't think that's correct. Doesn't the hippo campus store memories?

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

#299

Post by runeks »

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 can figure out how to put enough memristors in parallel, the transfer speed is essentially unlimited. It's the access time (latency) that is crucial, and makes all the difference, because it is inherent to the technology, and cannot be changed regardless of how many elements you string together.

This explains it well: http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html?HN_...

Several new non-volatile memory technologies have achieved latency down to 100 picoseconds. This is an order of magnitude faster than the L1 cache on a CPU (SRAM).

CPU power will again becomes the bottleneck, instead of storage. We will have to build completely new CPU architectures to make us of this though.

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