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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.
What's the point in running a brand new OS on it? Is HP-UX not good enough? Or the many other *NIX's? I'll put money on Linux being ported to it before it even ships to Joe Public
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
Finally! I'm so glad there's something to feel intrigued about in technology. I miss all the corporate labs doing amazing things.
Sounds like they want to obsolete themself, with three-quarters working on a project nobody might need.
There is probably major problem in using "it" with Linux, I wonder what the problem is....
839*929
I love linux/unix, but that sounds kind of sad to me.
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.
Just another attempt at creating a walled garden that only HP can play in. Even if it does its job well, unless its cheap, it will never catch on....
Where have you been? It's alright we know where you've been!
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Now instead of RTFM we can all RATM.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
I can't wait for the marketing campaign. How ironic would it be if Pink Floyd licensed "Welcome to The Machine" for the media blitz?
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.
What are you going to run on the OS? At least if the OS is based on something known (even if the arch is different) you have a path for porting applications chains.
What a waste of time, with all the people developing operating systems today. Why would they create a barrier to adoption by introducing an unnecessary learning curve that requires people to learn yet another way to use a computer?
Yeah, they are a for-profit corporation, I'm pretty sure most of what they do is a "money grab"; it's kind of their job.
And where is all the "walled garden" crap coming from? The O/S will be open source and they are looking to also release a Linux variant that will run on the thing.
Along with the new O/S, they are also working on getting both Linux, and (oddly) Android running on it.
If you RTFA, you'd see that they'd like to re-structure the O/S to take full advantage of the systems planned giganto memory capacity, instead of being built around shuffling data on and off disk.
What's the point of running *nix on it? If the architecture is so much different that they have to rewrite tons of OS code to support it, why not just build their own?
*nix is the fastest path to a stable and highly usable platform. Only a small portion of *nix interfaces with the architecture. They only have to rewrite that small portion.
Plus with *nix you have a rather large base of application software to run as well.
That said, could other parts of *nix or apps be reworked to take advantage of the architecture, possibly. But such efforts do not need to be part of v1.0.0. They can be part of subsequent versions if and when profiling indicates an issue or opportunity.
When a person wants to do something such as run Microsoft Word, the computer’s central processor will issue a command to copy the program and a document from the slow disk it had been sitting on and bring it temporarily into the high-speed memory known as DRAM that sits near the computer’s core, helping ensure that Word and the file you’re working on will run fast. A problem with this architecture, according to computing experts, is that DRAM and the Flash memory used in computers seem unable to keep pace with the increase in data use.
The author gives the problem that to access data the computer goes to the slow disk, and pulls the data in the fast memory so it can be operated against. Then the article goes on to say that memory can't keep up with the demand. That seems backwards to me. Isn't the problem they're trying to solve deals with how spinning disks have not had their data access speed increase at the pace of the rest of computer components, not memory?
And Meg will be the one that kills it because it doesn't have an ongoing revenue stream that provides 25% margins.
The new computer does not run on electricity. It runs on a new fuel cell that requires ink.
The new computer is meant to solve a coming crisis due to limitations around DRAM and Flash.
Would someone like to elaborate on this "coming crisis" that memristors magically solve?
I can think of plenty of limitations (in the present) to DRAM and flash that merely throwing money at the problem can't solve. I can also think of a few good uses for viable memristor technology (instant-wake hibernating-as-the-default-state computers as the obvious first use). I can't, however, think of any "crisis" that adding a pinch of memristor phlebotinum would solve.
While HP Labs may not be what it was, it is good to see that HP finally has a CEO that will give them the funding they need to go for the big ideas. We need more research and development funding period. The government needs to increase funding for the NSF and other organizations. And, yes, big companies need to start making long term investments. Microsoft Research is growing. It seems HP Labs is growing again.
Let's hope other big players step up too. I'm tired of money being thrown at yet another mobile application and having that being held up as a paragon of innovation. People are being critical of HP investing in this while Facebook throws 19B of assets at a messaging application? What's wrong with this picture?
Will the output be limited to a single number?
sic transit gloria mundi
The way you find new solution paradigms is to jump in with both feet.
HP already announced memristor development 5 years ago. My guess is the HP Labs team are going to make all sorts of discoveries as they work through the entire design of the "Machine."
HP made their massive profits by controlling their IP and making everything in-house. In this case, they have outsourced a great deal of this work. As such, it will be in China within 2 years. At that point, whitman will lose everything.
As somebody that used to work for HP, I am saddened by this. They have great tech, but whitman's run for short-term profits is destroying the company.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
i am remember hp having visions of replacing x86 with a new architecture and then AMD did x86-64. hp should know by now that a totally new hardware platform and totally new operating system isnt going to fly very far. Why not replace ethernet and tcp/ip while they are at it....
So I am guessing this is planned for corporate servers?
Or will everyone be playing Crysis 3 on Windows 10, The Machine edition?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Meg is the one who funded it, dummy. It's too bad you didn't even consider taking even a side glance at the article.
I think the idea is more about user data (rather than applications themselves) not being shuffled in and out on File I/O, the SCSI stack, LBA's, etc.
What kind of ink will this computer take?
What about that 3D Printer blurp ad with some dumb looking blonde on it? Or did those people lie also?
Data General killed itself inventing a New Machine with a soul.
Great name, assuming that their goal is to see how much pain a user can endure before going insane.
http://princessbride.wikia.com...
I'm all for more funding for researching new cutting edge technology but Whitman is going about it the wrong way. HP is laying off remote workers instead of the "dead weight" that routinely performs more poorly than their peers. What people don't understand is that remote workers at HP usually are stellar employees that had have to relocate due to some life event. Otherwise the possibility of remote work isn't even entertained. To cut the remote workers first, HP is taking themselves out before the competition does.
I'm sitting in the conference room where this was just announced at the HP Discover conference. The idea is to use photonics for interconnects, so that the limitations of copper don't require physical proximity to memory. And they want to use oxygen atoms with doubly-negative charge (ions) for data storage. The concept is to partner with universities to do some fundamental research and major changes in OS design to have a machine that can scale processor access to 160 PB of memory storage in microseconds.
None of this comprises fundamentally new ideas, but they are working hard to actually make it happen, which is pretty cool.
HP = Hewlett Packard
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
They should have checked on their brand image first. They make the worst laptops with the highest failure rates on anyone's scale. They are dead last in support satisfaction. Their PCs have a similar failure rate as well. I wouldn't buy a magical wish-granting lamp from them even if they proved it worked as long as it had an HP sticker on it.
Hmmm?
The guts?? The GUTS??
To pay for it, Meg just fired 30,000 people over the last 2 years, and is going to fire another 20,000 by next year. Sorry, Meg, that's chutzpah.
Anyone who's still at HP is hoping they're not next, or looking for another job.
And the name of programmer from that TV series is Finch. Clever, HP, I see the reference there :-)
There is no light without darkness.
What could possible go wrong?
>>What's the point in running a brand new OS on it? Is HP-UX not good enough? Or the many other *NIX's? I'll put money on Linux being ported to it before it even ships to Joe Public
Much as I like unixes (way back using early slackware distributions, now since 10 years on OSX), I do think that it is time for some real innovation. Unix dates from, what, 1970 or so. More than 40 years ago. We were all playing vinyl records for music back then. I think it would be good if a mainstream company (outside pure academia) would build from the ground up something usable yet radically fresh and truly future oriented. I remember that some 15 years ago Apple and IBM worked together on a radical object-oriented OS, but nothing came from it.
Why is Snark Required?
... what is left when you remove ...
An API that a whole lot of software can be compiled for. Having these apps and utilities from day 1 can be quite important.
... a machine with a nonvolatile memory system makes the idea of a filesystem delusional ...
The file system is a metaphor from the app and utility code's perspective. They don't real care if data is stored on platters or in RAM and when stored in RAM there still needs to be some method of organization. So the new machine has a persistent RAM disk, the existing filesystem code will still be useful.
Again, I'm referring to v1.0.0. Further improvements and customization for the new architecture can take place in later versions.
can I rage against it?
But I am glad to see innovation and not just another me-too architecture or incremental improvements. It may not be all tail winds and smooth sailing even if it is technically superior in many ways. Still without trying something revolutionary on occasion, all we get is small incremental evolutionary change. Evolutionary change is great, but it doesn't make the 'big step' breakthroughs that is needed on occasion to keep society moving forward!
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
What's with clicking on a /. page margin showing Youtube videos?
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
If HP had a real engineer (read: well-read, intellectual, having years of R&D and production experience) in the CEO seat, they would build a computer which nicely integrates CPU, SRAM, DRAM and Flash in a unified memory architecture.
They should have started doing that one two years ago, but I think any such machine would get obsoleted by an actual non-volatile RAM. Unless you'd make the memory manager extremely clever to emulate a huge RAM/RWM without wearing out the flash storage any time soon.
Ezekiel 23:20
John Swainson, not John Swanson.
"A return of LISP machines might be nice." Yeah, because then I could run Steamer (http://hci.ucsd.edu/hutchins/Steamer.html). It emulated the steam plant I was in charge of (as MPA) in the Navy 1972-1975. Without all the dirt, oil, seawater, tobacco smoke, and corrosion (not to mention sea sickness).