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Dell Exec Calls HP's New 'Machine' Architecture 'Laughable'
jfruh (300774) writes HP's revelation that it's working on a radical new computing architecture that it's dubbed "The Machine" was met with excitement among tech observers this week, but one of HP's biggest competitors remains extremely unimpressed. John Swanson, the head of Dell's software business, said that "The notion that you can reach some magical state by rearchitecting an OS is laughable on the face of it." And Jai Memnon, Dell's research head, said that phase-change memory is the memory type in the pipeline mostly like to change the computing scene soon, not the memristors that HP is working on.
MS must be loving this news!
Now we'll need a new form of ReactOS and/or WINE to reverse engineer this new OS.
Good times.
Yeah, maybe HP should shut down and give the money back to the shareholders. Right ?
It is kinda similar to not in my backyard syndrome.
Quite frankly I am happy this is happening, more competition to create the Next Big Thing is glorious.
There are so many great new tech that is around the corner, and the more competitors the better.
I'll just be happy that x86 dies the death it should have died many years ago.
It isn't even a horse any more, they are beating the bloody, dirty pulp that remains.
Just like all those CMOS chips that once you fuck up a setting their is no way at all clear them..
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
Maybe we'll see a return to proper programming to go with this new technology, then. I doubt it, but maybe.
Probably not a good idea to be dissing magic around computer wizards.
No-one's interested in his shitty computers anymore
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
If Dell has to misrepresent what HP is doing in one breath while disproving that misrepresentation in the next, just to have a straw man to poke fun at, then Dell must be a little scared.
Because of the phase change. You see. Tholean. Right. Thol. E. En. Is this thing on?
It must be nice to be so perfect and odor-free.
You can remove the CMOS battery or move the Clear CMOS jumper or power on the PC with a special key pressed (depending on the motherboard manufacturer it can be CTRL, or ALT or something else, always well documented).
HP, despite leadership's best efforts throughout the years, still does legitimate innovation. Dell has never done the whole innovation thing.
HP has a long history of OS and CPU design, including their own computers with a proprietary architecture. Not all of their designs were successful, since they were co-designers of the Itanium with Intel. So HP has the exactly opposite corporate background the Dell.
Why would anyone pay attention to what a Dell talking head has to say?
Why is Snark Required?
What an executive from Dell, a company that is almost single-handedly stifling innovation in the computer industry by continuing to push enormous volumes of generic wintel garbage out onto the market to the exclusion of anything else/new/better/etc, has to say about innovation.
Dell is rendered irrelevant nowadays. So they are looking for publicity to stay in the minds of the few who still like to hold on to the crap of yesteryears like my attachment to toshiba libretto mini laptops.
Bad mouthing others is often a good way to get publicity. They will be rendered mute by industry in a few weeks like qcomm's 64bit outcry - necessarily pointing out -"waa waa, he did it while I couldn't".
When did dell get any innovative stuff out ? Their business model in the beginning was probably the only true innovation. After that cheapness coefficient is the only discerning factor in their persona.
It is not CPU and Memory being the two main core components of modern computing fabric. Instead, it is the inter-connect and memory, and with these two, new high performance operating system would have to be developed.
If you look at today's data center processing vast amount of data, you can see that most of the space is not taken by servers with CPUs.
HP is their competitor. HP just announced that they're working on something that even if the entire thing doesn't come to fruition, likely some part will and it will change the computing landscape. Understand, this announcement is pointed directly at Dell's share holders.
Best case scenario HP actually pulls it off and they've got some radically fast system running something that looks like Linux.
Mid case scenario, they figure out how to make memsistors at scale and then sell licences for everybody to make blisteringly fast SSD's, etc. Then others come along and figure out how to put the pieces together. HP makes out like a bandit in royalties, etc.
Worse case, nothing comes out of this. HP shrugs, files a whole pile of patent applications. Someone else takes bits and pieces of it (like IBM) and does cool things with it. In all three cases HP is going to be enhance their IP portfolio and possibly make their stock worth more.
All of those scenarios are bad for Dell. Dell doesn't do fundamental science. They design motherboards that use components supplied by everybody else and crank out cheap computers. If scenario #1 comes true... HP is NOT going to sell any of this to Dell, cutting them out of the market. If scenario #2 comes true, HP is going to get these components at a price that Dell can't compete with. If the last scenario comes true, Dell still ends up being a VAR like everybody else and HP racks in royalties.
The CEO of Dell is almost obligated to thrown cold water all over this, otherwise Dell shareholders are naturally going to ask if this announcement is going to make Dells stock worth less and/or worthless.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
"With persistent memory, the machine state gets messed up, you are so screwed."
Uh, have you looked into your computer recently? I believe you'll find either this little device called "an HDD" or this other little device called "an SSD". And people with those seldom get screwed.
Ezekiel 23:20
The notion that you can reach some magical state by rearchitecting an OS is laughable on the face of it
Why, thank you, Captain Obvious! It's not about rearchitecting an OS, it's about matching SW to the HW. For ages, we've had the distinction between block-addressed devices with streamed access and byte-addressed devices (mostly DRAMs) for low-latency. Virtually all our software is impedance-matched to that idea! I believe the only thing remotely close to how a machine with huge persistent RAM should (would?) work are those nice Azul boxes, with zero-pause automated memory management even on 500GB+ heaps. Those machines still use RAM and have disk I/O for ordinary data manipulation, but I'm convinced that had the Azul people had non-volatile RAMs at that time, they would have gone for persistent objects. It's such an obvious idea! No more serializing and deserializing for disk I/O (except for backups, of course), performance on the order of millions of transactions per second. Obviously the price is that you absolutely have to rewrite the software bottom-up, otherwise all that extra performance potential gets lost.
Ezekiel 23:20
Yeah, and how many times have you just had to reformat the disk, because, really, it just won't recover ?
More than once, multiply that by millions of machines ?
I think memsistors will give us human-like computers
Memristors are a fundamental change in computation. Fuck dell and their bullshit spewing CEOs. Burn in hell dell.
Political programming?
I will set var A to 5.
If it's:
*
*
*
You want I can do it.
Var A is 4.5 we'll try to make it 5 the next period.
I wonder if this applies: First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.
"The notion that you can reach some magical state by rearchitecting an OS is laughable on the face of it," John Swainson, head of Dell's software business, told reporters in San Francisco Thursday when asked to comment on the work.
Well, sure, you also have to rearchitect the hardware, which is what HP is talking about. John Swainson is an idiot. Sadly, the richest idiots with the best-connected families fail upwards rather than downwards. This is why we can't have nice things.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A handful of times maybe in over 20 years, and I keep backups that I rarely need.
Those are the funniest three words I read today.
Announcements from executive leadership to ownership are made via boardroom table, not to reporters.
If you want to make an argument that Dell's 'announcement' was made to Dell customers or partners, you might be able to make a case. But the thought that they're 'announcing' this to rally support of shareholders is laughable.
...am super excited to see what kind of algorithms and applications could benefit from this kind of architecture: artificial intelligence, computer vision, ray-tracing, etc...
"The notion that you can reach some magical state by rearchitecting an OS is laughable on the face of it."
This is a very silly comment to make.What is laughable is the notion that today's software architecture somehow had reached some pinnacle of optimization.
Dell know how to assemble commodity-grade components spun off from the original IBM pc architecture. Why WOULD they know any architectural vision if it smacked them in the face...
is DELL making comments about HP.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/10/memristor_in_18_months/
Articles should include a link to the relevant video.
I found this gif of the event: http://stream1.gifsoup.com/vie...
You're welcome.
*rolls eyes*
your machine state is in your CPU and RAM
your persistent data is in your HDDs and SSDs
HP are trying to build hardware and an OS on top of it where this distinction no longer exists, with nonvolatile storage at "the speed of RAM", why not just store everything, both machine state and persistent data, in the one magical type of memory?
one of the many problems with this reasoning is exactly what you've failed to understand: with persistent memory, the machine state, as opposed to your donkey porn, gets messed up, and so you get to enjoy the brokenness
HP will doubtless counter with yet more pie in the sky "well, we could make a new breed of OS that is resilient in the face of corruption of critical structures', etc. for the last 20 years, HP labs have been layering bullshit on top of bullshit.
A reboot won't make it all good.
With persistent memory, the machine state gets messed up, you are so screwed.
Not such a big deal, really... as long as you engineer the machine so that it still bootstraps off CMOS like right now. The process would essentially be the same.
Of course the software guy at Dell is going to make noise about anything that competes with Microsoft. If it wasn't for them he wouldn't have a job.
Yes, magical things can be done at the OS level with some smart boffins - look at BeOS. I guess I am one of the view who who had a PC in the 1990s sporting Win95 that could barely play a two inch video clip without freezing. Meanwhile, on the same hardware BeOS could run clip after clip at the same time and never miss a beat! I wish I could remember how many videos and MP3s I had to load to bring it to its knees!
Having said this, as a former employee of the morally bankrupt HP it will be cold day in hell I give them another dollar.
one of the many problems with this reasoning is exactly what you've failed to understand: with persistent memory, the machine state, as opposed to your donkey porn, gets messed up, and so you get to enjoy the brokenness
*rolls eyes*
memset (0, 0, MAX_SIZE);
There, problem solved. Why do I keep reading Slashdot comments for technical topics?
"With persistent memory, the machine state gets messed up, you are so screwed."
Uh, have you looked into your computer recently? I believe you'll find either this little device called "an HDD" or this other little device called "an SSD". And people with those seldom get screwed.
If you read the article from the previous slashdot story about HP's "The Machine", you will find that they are not simply trying to use memsistors to replace main memory, but that they are also trying to consolidate the storage memory and working memory into a single piece of memory, this is why it is considered to be substantially different memory architecture which also requires the OS to work a little differently too... if you are old enough think "Ram Disk"
The difference being that usually any stored data to be used by the processor has to first be loaded into working memory from the large slow storage memory... as i'm sure you are aware, which is why SSDs are so popular... but even NAND is many times slower than SDRAM, so the separation remains.
The idea is that if a sufficiently fast, dense, persistent and cheap type of memory can be found then the best of both can be consolidated into one. The concern of the OP is that issues affecting running state could affect the traditionally less dynamic stored state... Working memory is usually treated as volatile and disposable, and your block device is not, but the line is now blurred.
I think it's a reasonable concern, but one that is likely to be addressed by the OS, a less physical separation between what is running state and what is not would need to be implemented, but at the same time the advantages of not "loading" data need to be retained... making everything that goes into the running state duplicate would bring back the "loading" problem slightly.
. . . or at least suggest that you qualify your statement.
At it's inception, Dell was quite innovative. But that innovation was limited to business practices, not engineering or technology. Compaq got the ball rolling, but Dell developed the production and marketing models that brought the price of usable desktop computers down to the sub-$1000 level. This was probably as instrumental in putting a computer on every desktop as anything Bill Gates did. Other manufacturers copied and improved upon the model later, but Dell's decisions not only made computers more affordable, but also introduced to a generation concepts that are now considered mainstream (CPU, RAM, etc.), but which had been considered indecipherable techy arcana. I believe this significantly increased computer adoption, simply by demystifying the strange beige boxes.
These may not have been technological innovations, but they were definitely innovations, and led to the kind of "creative destruction" so often given lip service by conservatives (whose actual practices are mostly about maintaining market stability and the fortunes of those who have already won them, rather than innovation.)
Why do I keep reading Slashdot comments for technical topics?
That's probably because you're an idiot.
You don't get to execute that memset when the machine is in a bad state. If you could, you arguably had it under control.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Nice quote! No. kidding. Who cares what Dell says. Have they ever been an innovator? It think they were just the pinnacle of selling commodity hardware online. HP and Apple both do substantially more research.
one of the many problems with this reasoning is exactly what you've failed to understand: with persistent memory, the machine state, as opposed to your donkey porn, gets messed up, and so you get to enjoy the brokenness
Except that you don't know that there is no technical solution to that problem. Apparently, those people think there might be. I've thought the same since like fifteen years ago (only there didn't seem to be any relevant promising technologies at that time for suitable non-volatile storage, so I stopped thinking about it). In fact, it wouldn't be the first time a resilient system with non-volatile RAM would get built.
Ezekiel 23:20
The computer industry has been in a state of mild panic for several years.
Why?
I think Dell have a lot to answer for.
See, you go back in time twenty years, there was a lot more competition. Small computer stores in every town, larger companies doing mail order and such - you could pick up any computer magazine and 50-70% of it would be adverts.
But there is one small problem. Virtually none of those companies were run by people who had a fucking clue how to design or sell a product. About all they knew was how to assemble components into a functioning computer and flog the end result - they'd essentially industrialised the process of buying components and building your own computer.
Easiest business model in the world, on paper at least. You just had to get the components in, build your computers and get adverts in the magazines quickly enough that you could shift everything before it became obsolete and you were left with stock that you'd have to sell at a loss just to shift it.
There was just one small problem. There was precisely no imagination behind it. Pretty much the only selling point anyone could come up with was "We are cheaper than our competitors!". And if an entire industry spends twenty years using that as their selling point, sooner or later what will happen is it really will be the only noticeable difference. Once that happens, you are competing with the Wal-Marts and the Dells of this world and you're competing with them on their terms. A combination of mergers, acquisitions and wholesale business collapses has led us to where we are today - if you tried to resurrect some of those old print magazines and called up all your old advertisers to ask if they'd be interested in taking out an ad, 90% of them are out of business.
HP, it seems, have finally had enough. They're throwing in the towel in this race to the bottom - they've decided that rather than bet the company on being 2% cheaper than Dell on average this quarter, they're going to bet the company on doing the same thing but doing it better. Frankly, this is a refreshing change and one that the entire industry is in dire need of.
maybe once on a non-windows machine, because the raid controller flaked out. Otherwise, backups and new drives when drives go bad have been all I have needed. I also have multiple machines, over many years. I guess if you'd stop using an OS with a crappy file system designed over 20 years ago, you too might just be able to run without reformatting. I haven't regretted the move in over 10 years.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
It's still like that now in some places. You can buy a PC from mail order, go to your large department/electronics store or buy a the components from a computer parts store or ask them to build a PC for you.
I've done the first one a couple of times with Dell, then order laptops, and more recently had a couple of PC's built.
The biggest problems I've encountered was that one of those PC's with the plastic panels and extra space for cooling fans would crash whenever there was rainstorm nearby (as indicated by a smartphone app). I just happened to be next to a weather radar station. The next PC worked much better but there were problems when a video connector cable was moved, it would twist the GPU board slightly so that one of the locking screws would make contact with the metal clips of the SATA cables. Another problem was that the metal pipes of the CPU cooling fan prevented certain memory chips from having space to go in their sockets due to the extra large plastic tabs.
Any manufacturer who could provide a consistent set of components that worked together would be on a big win.
You're. HP will never think of a way to boot a different system on the machine with access to memory. That's crazy talk. This is just the exact same problem everyone had with core memory based minicomputers; as soon as they crashed you had to throw the whole thing away!
Working at HP (in the ES department), I am glad to hear this kind of news. Meg has a very tough plan to implement; our team THINKS we're safe from this year's layoff (new team, ITIL requires us, we do SM for AA and soon UA too after the merger's done) and ANY investments in something new is a good thing, even if it fails. Go big or go home; at least we're trying to do something. A huge chunk of our services are VM based, 40-100 servers in a blade rack. If this works well, just my department has two huge datacenters that could use this right now...and I have no idea how many datacenters there are company-wide as we're basically what's left of SABRE / EDS. This is basically the single "golden ray of hope" of something actually new happening with our company!
And people with those seldom get screwed.
It's not like I want to be a virgin, you insensitive clod.
But the real scandal is what both Dell and HP call support. Complete joke and worthless, time after time, year after year.
So, you've never heard of putting software in ROM?
So how does a PC boot now? When you start it up the memory is full will random contents! How will it execute that?
Oh wait, there is a boot rom mapped in to the address space. Someone thought of that decades ago.
it's been done before, Smalltalk
Well, yes, except you have to design it in.
The problem with non-volatile instant on is that the arrogant SOB's who sell it will assume nothing will ever go wrong :). Not saying that it can't be done, but that marketing will get involved and 'press the reset button' will no longer do anything useful for you. "Working to brick" in record time.
Maybe we'll see a return to proper programming to go with this new technology, then.
When was this legendary golden age of "proper programming"? I learned to program in the 1970s. Most of the code from that era was horrible FORTRAN spaghetti code. It was garbage compared to most code today, which at least has some structure and encapsulation.
Unified persistent address space. Object oriented system. Maybe we could do it properly this time.
So what is gonna reset the Program Counter back to refer to the boot ROM, when everything is nonvolatile, including the PC? The physical reset button they'll re-introduce? Keep dreaming.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I believe you'll find either this little device called "an HDD" or this other little device called "an SSD". And people with those seldom get screwed.
Must be why they store porn on them.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
...as bubble memories and tunnel diodes were.
Just like what happens now, when the software interrupt fires, the PC gets pointed to the ISR.
Unless your system is completely poked and the keyboard driver won't fire the interrupt when you ctrl-alt-del, you call IT help and follow their instructions when they say "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"
It will live next door nor say much and borrow some sugar.
Famous Steve Ballmer comment about iphone. And what followed in the next few years would be a lesson for anyone who laugh prematurely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And what makes the software interrupt "fire"?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
The keyboard driver, that was woken up by hardware interrupts from the usb port.
But I use PS/2, you insensitive clod.
(Fair enough.)
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Here is a brief upbeat video overview of the Dell PowerEdge C8000: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk99tXAJJj4
Here is an overview of the PowerEdge C8000: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk99tXAJJj4