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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

#221

Post by hderms »

maxerickson wrote: post #153
jerf wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Spatial audio that supports dynamically computed surround sound for arbitrarily many speakers and headphones." Still covers only a small arbitrary constant factor of data that is already very small by modern standards. Note that surround sound data is, IIRC, already not "twice" the size of stereo. And your video points 1 and 2 are also still at most only small constant factors of increase over what we already have,…

Isn't having a computer process some data and zoom in on a portion of it 'using of data beyond the rate at which our senses can convey information to our brains'? I guess you are talking about the utility of media at higher and higher fidelity and I am just snagging on how you have phrased it.

It's a good point, though. He is mainly speaking to the data rates for media involving 'guided' experiences. Interactive experiences would benefit much more linearly with the amount of data able to be stored (google maps on your phone analogy).

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

#222

Post by AnthonyMouse »

sp332 wrote: post #97
yeukhon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the issue with RAM disk to address your concern about "no disk"?

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.

You save things to persistent storage because you want the copy. In the large majority of cases the format on the filesystem is different from the format in memory because the file format is meant to be more readable by humans or by machines with a different endianness or pointer size etc., whereas data in memory is binary and platform-specific to optimize for fast access by the local machine. The benefit of that distinction doesn't go away just because you make the persistent storage faster.

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

#223

Post by wmf »

sp332 wrote: post #184
colanderman wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It sounds like HP is pitching it as memory.

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

#225

Post by AnthonyMouse »

enjoy-your-stay wrote: post #124
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?

I guess it would be like an OS that once loads and starts, will run forever. You can put your machine to sleep which will freeze the sate, and then bring it back on again and start processing instructions from where it left off. But if that's the case then they'll have to think of ways to do e.g. OS upgrades - where you normally reboot to flush the old code out of RAM. Or how will you recover if you load a bad driver…

I really don't understand this whole discussion about redesigning operating systems for this. Just because you have a machine that doesn't lose memory state on power failure doesn't mean you can't reboot it.

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

#226

Post by mindslight »

jacquesm wrote: post #219
mindslight wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it must somehow follow that parasitic mem-resistance must have been with us all along I'm not so sure about that. It's impossible to make things without unwanted series/parallel resistances because conductors/insulators aren't perfect. It's impossible to make things without parasitic capacitance because without a perfect insulator, any two points have some capacitance between them - just like how there's also a par…

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 a third terminal for a power supply, a different abstraction limit) a standard building block of modern circuits, even in just hobbyist discrete form?

I'm sure there are specific devices being worked on that have exciting applications to memory, and I'm certainly not putting down the researchers involved with them or their work. But it seems like the "memristor" narrative is a bit of a hype train that has taken on a life of it's own. Let's say one team of researchers were to develop a miniature device with a similar but decidedly non-linear effect. Would this make it any less important?

(And if my judgment is wrong and we end up with an entirely new family of passives based on the same fundamental physics with usual differentiation based on power handling/size/etc, I'll be happy to eat my words).

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

#227

Post by Rebelgecko »

groby_b wrote: post #111
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.

Not to derail the topic - but maps already does that. Search for your area. Pull up info sheet for it. Click "Save map to use offline". (Although I've got no idea if it checks for changes)

Google maps does check for changes, but in a sort of braindead way. Every 30 days it'll check for map updates, and if it can't (e.g. no internet connection) it'll just delete your locally saved maps.

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

#228

Post by aaronblohowiak »

aidenn0 wrote: post #158
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…

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...

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

#229

Post by jacquesm »

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…

> And if my judgment is wrong and we end up with an entirely new family of passives based on the same fundamental physics with usual differentiation based on power handling/size/etc, I'll be happy to eat my words

That will be the best case ever of being happy to be wrong. If true the implications are on par with some pretty advanced SF in terms of computing power and storage. Content addressable memory anybody?

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