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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.
Yeah, maybe HP should shut down and give the money back to the shareholders. Right ?
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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...
Do you truly, honestly, I mean...REALLY believe that Microsoft expends any time at all even thinking about ReactOS or WINE, let alone worrying about the .00000000000001 of a fraction of a portion of a negligible amount of a percent effect it might, MIGHT have on their bottom line?
Seriously, answer seriously, please.
The entire cost of electronics is the NRE: look at your $800 iPhone - raw materials inside:
Three spoonfulls of oil to make the plastic bits.
Two spoonfulls of sand to make the silicon bits (includes the glass screen and fibreglass PCBs).
Not quite enough copper to make 2 inches of water pipe,
Not quite enough steel to make a table knife or fork.
Not much at all of quite a few other things
Way more than 2,000,000 man-hours of highly paid engineers' design time (if you include time to design every single component, including bought-in CPU, graphics, etc- remember to descend recurssively into the design of every single bit of logic, power disttribution, analog bits). Of course most has been amortized over the past 50 years, Apple only pays for the top layer.
If you start again from scratch, you might not need to go back to George Boole, or Aristotle, but you risk having to redevelop one hell of a lot.
Perhaps you shold meet a few engineers and talk to them.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Not those Non Reoccurring Expenses. He's talking about the cocaine and associated business costs with marketing and sales meetings.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"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.
Another way to look at it: the $800 iPhone 5S 64GB contains $210 of parts and cost $8 to assemble, with giving an almost 300% mark-up. Laptop margins are usually 10% or less, Apple's laptop mark-ups are greater, around 30%. 300% is really remarkable.
Way more than 2,000,000 man-hours of highly paid engineers' design time (if you include time to design every single component, including bought-in CPU, graphics, etc- remember to descend recurssively into the design of every single bit of logic, power disttribution, analog bits). Of course most has been amortized over the past 50 years, Apple only pays for the top layer.
...
I guess we should count all of the hours spent in metallurgic and mechanical development since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution when considering the cost of car then?
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
This might be the year of ReactOS on the desktop.
Actually the financial math is all about amortizing those costs over the life of the product. So if Apple sold 4 iPhones they would have to allocate 500,000 man hours to each phone. The same with all those developments over time. Modern PCB technology is actually quite cool and no doubt took some serious development, but it has been amortized over a zillion PCBs. Apple would actually be paying those amortized costs as well in that any recent developments would still be including those costs when some company uses a recent development to supply them with a part.
But the key to amortizing a cost is that it eventually effectively hits zero. So the costs from Industrial Revolution developments were long ago reduced to zero. Although many times the amortization is a curve that is asymptotically zero; thus to be pedantic it is possible that some impossibly small portion of an iPhone is still paying off the development time spent 100's of years ago. From an economics point of view this is not actually impossible. There could be an area that specialized in say, fine machining, 300 years ago to a point where the same companies are in the same area still leaders in that field. Thus apple would have bought some of their manufacturing equipment from that company. Examples of this abound in Germany where there are plenty of companies that are from the Prussian Empire or before that are world leaders in their area of expertise; so good they survived Napoleon, WWI, and WWII. Krupp I believe is around 400 years old.
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.
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!