The Machine: A new kind of computer | Hacker News Reader

The Machine: A new kind of computer

hpl.hp.com

49 pointsk4jh20 comments

I've been following The Machine for a while, a try to summarise:

The Machine is unique in that it can stack huge amounts of memory without communication issues with the CPU because it uses light instead of copper for transacting data internally. The memory is called Memristors and are persistent, just like a harddrive/SSD. They are also much faster since they stack in parallel and can be written/read in parallell, similar to a RAID setup but with better scaling.

These combinations enable extremely fast speeds to access and process data, but it also needs a better and faster back-end (Operating System) to handle the new way of thinking about memory and data processing.

I see a LOT of amazing changes if they manage to launch it.

Like enormous 3D worlds with no texture or model-popping with 4K textures all in real-time and in VR. Stuff of dreams!

One interesting thing: intel has been working for years on light communications between chips. Why is HP launching this first and not intel ?

My guess is that Intel will actually reach usability first by going the traditional route and have it "compatible" with current operating systems.

This way they will be first to market with a directly usable platform, while in the meantime work on a new OS or fork one of their existing platforms (Like Tizen) and adapt it for this new tech.

Though this will depend on a compatible Linux kernel and i see this as the part taking the longest time!

I'd expect "The Machine" to ship as a specialised coprocessor machine first.

There are users right now who'd pay $^7 for in-memory like performance over datasets too big for traditional memory (eg graph processing).

That will avoid the problem of low yield with the new technology which can be a problem for consumer products where a higher volume is needed.

Highest discussion thread, from 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7878949

Thanks. Since these are really the same story with two different URLs, we're demoting this one as a dupe.

See the FAQ (linked to at the bottom of most pages) for the policy on dupes and reposts.

Is there a decent article on the architecture of this thing? All I can find is PR.

If this doesn't work out, it's probably the last Big Idea to come out of HP for a long time.

Here's a blog post with some more detail about the project beyond just hype:

http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Cloud-Source-Blog/The-Machine-a...

I can't load the page, but read the Readability cached copy.

Not sure this says much. That said, a shakeup in the computer market is ok with me. Things are getting faster I suppose, but SSDs are the most revolutionary thing to happen in PCs for a long time (at least in terms of bang-for-buck performance).

Although I can't tell if this is for servers or PCs.

"embed security control points throughout the hardware and software stacks"

This is the only part that feels questionable - UEFI hasn't been met with much happiness in the community. So this would need to be pretty open to be happily accepted.

Edit: what's with the down-votes?

If I recall correctly, the "big idea" here was to eliminate the distinction between RAM and disk. That would be huge for both servers and PCs.

I love this part :

"We’re pushing the boundaries.., using electrons for computation, photons for communication, and ions for storage."

I wonder if there is a release schedule? The last time I read about it, it was far from prototype.

If the engineering effort is anything like the focus grouping effort, it should be amazing.

tldr: 'The Machine' is a concept, to have servers with SSDs and more memory and CPU cache, connected by Fibre cables.

I don't really think that's the TLDR, it rather seems to be that memristors are as fast as RAM yet store data permanently, and that using photons to transmit information is faster than copper wires.

Iirc, memristors (can) have much higher read speeds than capacitor RAM. It makes sense, if you consider how they work.

Is that accurate? I haven't bothered chasing down a cache of the page but as I remember "The Machine" the concept is to have a huge, flat, persistent memory built on memristors. No CPU cache, no main memory, no separate storage.

If they dropped all that to do a standard architecture with faster interconnects, I'm rather disappointed.

The main ideas seem to be replacing both RAM and storage with memristors, removing the distinction between them architecturally, and using photonic interconnects internally.

So it's a bit confusing where you got your tldr from.

This is categorically false. The machine is a new computer architecture which merges storage and memory. It is a demonstration of memristors, hardware used to implement low-latency byte-addressable persistent memory.

SOURCE: I work at HP-Labs writing systems software for the machine.

I apologise for interpreting it incorrectly, but I do think the marketing is very misleading, mostly because of the excessive use of buzzwords, and lack of technical details.

Do you have any links to research papers or technical blog posts, etc?

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