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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

#181

Post by swimfar »

frik wrote: post #129
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…

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.

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 M being a property of the memristor(memdamper?). Or in other words, v=M.F; velocity is proportional to the force. (The dots are multiplication. Asterisks italicize the text)

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

#182

Post by ableal »

ambler0 wrote: post #130

From the last paragraph: "The Machine isn’t on HP’s official roadmap. Fink says it could arrive as early as 2017 or take until the end of the decade. Any delivery date has to be taken with some skepticism given that HP has been hyping the memristor technology for years and failed to meet earlier self-imposed deadlines." So, does anyone actually know whether significant new progress is being made on this project, or i…

Well, in the past there was also some hoopla about IBM's Josephson junction and Intel's bubble memories.

After a few years, the subject goes away to die in encyclopedia articles.

If you do not have a viable product after six years, the outlook is bleak ...

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

#183

Post by scythe »

There's a catch, of course -- always a catch: a truly nonvolatile memristor violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But see:

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n4/abs/ncomms2784.ht... (open access)

The physics is (unsurprisingly) rather involved and I don't have time to decipher it, but, yeah, here's the guts.

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

#184

Post by sp332 »

colanderman wrote: post #112
sp332 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Filesystem semantics are a bottleneck. Fusion IO had to get rid of them when they demoed their billion-IOPS platform last year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3434711 For communicating data between programs, would you create a filesystem object that points to memory inside your program, or what?

That doesn't make any sense. Create a file, memory-map it, bam, you have RAM performance with "filesystem semantics". (There is NO overhead associated with memory-mapping a file on a ramdisk in the Linux kernel.) Probably what they're referring to is something more along the lines of replacing SCSI or NFS with a protocol that is a better match for the random access patterns used to access in-memory structures. (Hence…

Hm, how would this memristor stuff connect to the system? Will it look like a memory controller or more like PCI-e flash?

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

#185

Post by babuskov »

zentiggr wrote: post #132
jacquesm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

StreetView is overkill to me, basic navigation is pretty much a must, even if you have no dataplan. But of course that's not the way smartphones are being marketed. I've been holding out from the smartphone revolution for quite a while now, but a phone that would do off-line navigation would be a good thing because that means one less thing to carry along. I don't like having services forced upon me when a single dow…

Check out MapsWithMe - OpenStreetMap packaged as a basic mapping app, paid pro package for more than basic mapping/location pointing. The OSM db is segmented by country/province/US state so you can tailor the size / coverage as desired. Haven't looked at the pro pricing or feature list, just having maps that my off-network, GPS equipped old brick can use near home is sweet enough.

I tried MapsWithMe, but those are only maps, no navigation.

If you use Android, check out OsmAnd. It uses the same OSM maps, has navigation (with voice pack too) and it's free for up to 8 countries IIRC. I have been using it for about three months and it works pretty good.

The only problem I found is that city names for some countries are in local language, so if you go to Greece for example, you would have to type in the names in Greek letters. It they fixed this, it would be perfect.

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

#186

Post by valarauca1 »

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?

Likely my basic understanding of memristors they require a certain ramp time. So I don't think it'll replace cache.

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

#187

Post by sp332 »

colanderman wrote: post #160
sp332 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lot of unnecessary copying. The data is already in RAM, but you "save" it to a different RAM location, in the RAM disk. Or if you do all your work directly on the file in the RAM disk, you have to deal with filesystem overhead constantly.

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?

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

#188

Post by krisgee »

jacquesm wrote: post #91
zevyoura wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by integration; are you proposing that the mapping app contain the complete map data, which is then occasionally updated as needed? There's a clear advantage to not storing several GB of data you rarely if ever need on a device with very limited storage space.

Flash is a commodity, a typical navigation device will store all the maps for all of Europe including the most crazy little roads and cost a relatively small fraction of a cell phone, includes a good chunk of the hardware and comes with an SD slot for upgrades. Cell phones could easily provide navigation capabilities for at least the country of origin of the buyer and several around it if the creators decided this wa…

>a typical navigation device will store all the maps for all of Europe

Yeah but it won't also have several GB of games, audio, apps and photos on it as well. People would cry bloody murder if they found out google was using 7 GB of space to cache the world map by default.

If you are a person who needs a world map at their fingertips there are apps for that but the average person just needs google maps to figure out what turn the should take occasionally.

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

#189

Post by vram22 »

angersock wrote: post #70
cwyers wrote: post #45

"HP’s bet is the memristor, a nanoscale chip that Labs researchers must build and handle in full anticontamination clean-room suits." So... it's a chip.

Is it web scale? Can we make it social?

Will it be able to drive itself? Or think?

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

#190

Post by tbrownaw »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #87
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.

Well only one pool of data, no more registers, cache, hard drives etc. The storage will live next to the logic. What's more, memristors can act was logic units as well as storage, and do it interchangeably.

Well only one pool of data, no more registers, cache, hard drives etc. The storage will live next to the logic.

Even if all storage uses the same underlying persistence technology, access times will still depend on the distance between the data and the logic. If there are ALUs intertwingled with the storage, access times will still depend on how close the various pieces of data being worked on together are.

Parallel algorithms tend to lose performance as they get chattier and as node speed is lost to increase node count.

Storage living next to logic is effectively a miniaturized version of the "datacenter as a computer" or "warehouse-scale computer" setup that some places are using already. I seem to recall seeing whole books written on the additional complexities of writing software to take advantage of such an environment.

There will never be "only one pool of data". At a minimum, there will be "data in the physical thing that stays on the desk", "data in the physical thing that goes in my pocket", "data on such-and-such private network", and "data available over the Internet".

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