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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

#241

Post by mbell »

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.

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

#242

Post by mitchty »

trebor wrote: post #93
colanderman wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So imagine the difference in an operating system that could retain its running image between reboots What do you mean by this? This sounds like hibernation to me. not have to distinguish things like stack/heap I'm lost here too. This is a distinction that is made for purposes of program structure, not to kotow to demands of hardware.

Okay, imagine that to put your computer into hibernation mode all you need to do is hit the power button. This is instantaneous because none of the data has to be synced to permanent memory, because it's already in permanent, non-volatile memory . I'm not sure what he means by distinguishing between stack/heap either.

The stack heap is a bit of a jab at the harvard architecture in general.

I see memristors as being closer to a Von Neumann architecture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture

Even then its not a perfect analogy admittedly. Sorry for the confusion!

I guess a better analogy would be able to be get rid of the idea of "loaded into memory" versus "in ram" versus on permanent storage.

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

#243

Post by jacquesm »

XorNot wrote: post #238
mindslight wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Every effect is linear if you constraint your domain enough. But you are right - the real news is more that we've got a new way to manufacture some type of memory storage element (that's also conveniently fundamentally tiny). It is definitely not the only way though: IBMs been working on magnetic racetrack memory for some time which would have many of the same advantages.

Magnetic racetrack sounds like bubble memory warmed over with associated feelings. The good news is that 'bubbles' are real, they just never broke through commercially.

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

vs

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

So many common elements.

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

#244

Post by rntz »

The article mentions that

> Fink has assigned one team to develop the open-source Machine OS, which will assume the availability of a high-speed, constant memory store.

I have to ask: if this is open-source, where is it? Perhaps my google-fu is weak, but I can't find anything but news articles talking about "The Machine".

EDIT: Aha, found mention in some articles that it "will be made" open source. Future tense. That makes more sense.

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

#245

Post by Tuna-Fish »

Touche wrote: post #167
__david__ wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same reason has a closing tag but does not: HTML is SGML where certain tags can be made optional. XML specifically did away with this and made all close tags mandatory (even on contentless tags, which is why xhtml requires you to do ).

Just to be clear, are some closing tags optional or are all closing tags optional? If the former, how do you know which?

In this case, the schema probably disallows any other tags inside , which makes superfluous and it can thus be omitted. If s are not recursive and poems cannot contain s outside s, can also be omitted. Etc etc.

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

#246

Post by ars »

trumbitta2 wrote: post #194
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…

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 must flow faster in order for the flow rate to remain unchanged.

But if the nozzle feeds into a high pressure part of the pipe then things just slow down.

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

#247

Post by viraptor »

jerf wrote: post #115
JoshTriplett wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Music hit the ceiling long time ago - nobody's going to go for higher resolution / sampling rate than the current "uncompressed" sound. Spatial audio that supports dynamically computed surround sound for arbitrarily many speakers and headphones. > 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 the…

"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,…

> Note that surround sound data is, IIRC, already not "twice" the size of stereo.

Even stereo is also not twice the size of mono. (using joint-stereo encoding)

Agree with all the other points too.

> 2) Complete depth data, allowing dynamic depth of field changes.

This does extend the natural sense range, but is also already possible/done.

> 3) Complete geometry and scene-graph data, allowing you to change the camera and perspective.

That should actually take less space than the final scene in many cases...

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

#248

Post by JohnBooty »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #236
JohnBooty wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because processors are now so many orders of magnitude faster than main memory a huge percentage of their transistors and complexity are allocated to things like caching, prefetch, and branch prediction. Those features that are the only things saving modern processors from spending nearly all of their time doing nothing useful while they're waiting for data to be retrieved from main memory. Look at a Core i7 CPU die,…

Would this really be fast enough to do away with cache completely? A 100x speedup from main memory to L1 cache sounds pretty low, although I don't have any figures to back that up. If this is slower than L1 will there not be a major performance drop to the point we'd have to use at least some cache still?

Without knowing any of the details I'd guess that the processor would still benefit from some small amount of cache.

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

#249

Post by ohitsdom »

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.
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