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HP Unveils 'The Machine,' a New Computer Architecture
pacopico writes: HP Labs is trying to make a comeback. According to Businessweek, HP is building something called The Machine. It's a type of computer architecture that will use memristors for memory and silicon photonics for interconnects. Their plan is to ship within the next few years. As for The Machine's software, HP plans to build a new operating system to run on the novel hardware. The new computer is meant to solve a coming crisis due to limitations around DRAM and Flash. About three-quarters of HP Labs personnel are working on this project.
It’s a bold strategy Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for them.
If this doesn't work out, I can't see HP staying in business as an independent company.
The article yammers on and on about how the O/S will be built based on memory-driven I/O instead of file-system based I/O. However, IBM's i/OS (a.k.a. OS/400) has been built on memory-mapped I/O from the beginning (circa 1988.) (And it has a DB-driven "filesystem" that Microsoft has been unable to ship despite about 25 years of failure.)
I know it's not quite the same thing, but I cannot imagine that this new O/S will somehow eliminate the need for flash and/or disk. I don't see them managing to get the memristor cost down enough to entirely replace disk/flash. If they had actually shipped some of the things before now, I could maybe believe it, but they haven't.
Well, Meg Whitman had the guts to say "Find them some money" when HPLabs proposed the "Machine." I wish HP all the success.
It is about time some corporation stepped up to the plate other than Apple and jump-starts mega-improvement in major devices.
My first time sharing "Mini-computer" (was not mini sized), desktop engineering computer (using mag-strips pre-HP45), & then the HP35-41-45-75 were all incredible computing devices for their day.
I don't think you quite understand what they are doing here. They are essentially getting rid of the "slow disk, fast memory" method of computing by combining storage and memory into a single unit. If they make it work, then it will be a game-changer for lots of industries.
When your 500GB "disk" is directly addressable on the system bus and has the same latency as RAM, some of the design decisions in existing *nix look a bit questionable. Example: Does the additional work of implementing virtual memory (fundamental to most kernels) still make sense? How necessary is a file system *at all*? Could it be replaced with some other method of indexing data?
You certainly could just stick most of the storage in a ramdisk and run linux, but there might be massive performance gains to be had in the file (data?) serving and database spaces if the server software and the kernel it's running on are designed specifically for stable direct addressing of everything.
cogito ergo dubito