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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

#271

Post by pavement »

politician wrote: post #22
valarauca1 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This means we might be able to make a literal version of the hitchhikers guide. All of human knowledge in your hand, no network connectivity needed.

> I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices [of copyright attorneys and trade industry groups] suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

Guess again. All that storage represents a virtually limitless crypto-space within which intellectual property rights holders can create one-time-pads, and disenfranchise future consumers with.

When combined with ubiquitous 4G coverage, all they'll ever need to stream are the limitless persistent auth tokens, as locking and unlocking assets as frequently as bandwidth will allow, while remaining profitable.

I bet some of the greediest and most tyrranical IP controllers will have 1:1 authentication ratios, with each and every text character, audio sample and pixel per video frame, such that they'll never reduce bandwidth, and even create backlogs of access history, for billing purposes, when network connectivity returns.

Yes, because you accessed five seconds of full motion video, and witnessed content in which Lady Gaga's eyes moved five pixels to the left, while she pronounced a fricative syllable in the third verse of her top 40 hit single, you now owe Viacom 1/20th of one cent. NOTE: Costs do not include third-party fees covering closed-captioning for the hearing impared.

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

#272

Post by darkmighty »

Keyframe wrote: post #235
sp332 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With no history and no pictures. It's useful, but it's not really "wikipedia" anymore :)

I remember reading about Xowa and there was stated that English wikipedia requires 25GB and images additional ~80GB which you can all download and access offline with Xowa. Considering there are 128GB SD and micro SDXC cards readily available for ~$100... that's actually amazing.

I suspect if you selected 5% of the most "useful" articles you'd miss out almost nothing and be able to pack in a very small size actually.

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

#273

Post by PhasmaFelis »

jayantsethi wrote: post #266

Can someone please explain how can light be used to transfer data in computers?

I assume they're talking about fiber optics, or something similar. An optical fiber "wire" made of silica or plastic carries photons the way copper carries electrons. Most telecom trunks use them these days.

The only thing is that I've never heard of fiber optics being used inside a machine, only to connect one machine to another. I imagine the principles are similar, though.

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

#275

Post by frik »

viraptor wrote: post #34
sliverstorm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software grows to match the hardware. If storage goes up 100x, data will grow to accommodate. Some things won't grow, to be sure. Anything text-based, for example. But movies, music, pictures... would probably all explode in fidelity and thus size.

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 display). Depending on the holographic technology you need additonally a very high resolution in contrast to the visual output. If you use a common HD resolution the current visible pixel range is about 640x480 - at least some expensive research displays I used in 2011.

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

#276

Post by danmaz74 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #261
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…

memristors, like core memory, are destructively read. You measure the current to set them to 1 capturing the ones where you needed more current (they were zero initially) and the ones that needed less current (they were one initially). You capture the state in a register, and in the second half of the cycle you write the zeros back where the register shows the were originally zero. As core memory before it showed, yo…

memristors, like core memory, are destructively read but are they really, with HP implementation - which is not a "real" memristor? In the video presentation [1] they show that they change the state of the memristor using very short "high" voltage impulses, and then measure its resistance using lower voltages that do not make the oxygen vacancies migrate - and thus do not change the state, if I understood that correctly.

If they can use these low voltages (and low currents) to effectively read the state without altering it, they get incredibly simplified management of the memory, and incredibly low power read operations, which would justify their assertion that their memristors can be packed in 3d without thermal problems.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY

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

#277

Post by stevenhuang »

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?

It means something like this has never done before, and so HP would be the first to develop the software to do this!

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

#278

Post by rodgerd »

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.

History and talk pages can be very important.

When I saw that the film Defiance was based on a interesting-sounding real set of events, I looked at them on Wikipedia. The history and talk pages had an ongoing edit war with a sizable number of commentators who appeared to feel that the Bielskis should be treated as criminals and murderers rather than fêted as heroes, due to their killing of local Nazi sympathisers.

If you just stuck to the hashed-out Wikipedia page that was current, you'd be completely oblivious to the whole controversy.

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

#279

Post by klodolph »

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…

Is it not "actually" a memristor in the same sense that an electrochemical capacitor is not "actually" a capacitor: it exhibits the same properties as a capacitor, but the properties are caused by redox reactions instead of electric fields (even though most chemistry is really just electric fields anyway)?

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

#280

Post by regularfry »

viraptor wrote: post #34
sliverstorm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software grows to match the hardware. If storage goes up 100x, data will grow to accommodate. Some things won't grow, to be sure. Anything text-based, for example. But movies, music, pictures... would probably all explode in fidelity and thus size.

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…

Caches for streaming the media. The BBC has this problem every now and again, with big events or popular shows: the pipes to the cabinets in the streets aren't big enough to unicast to everyone simultaneously. A CDN node in every cabinet is probably not too far off.
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