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With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

595 points by justincormack 12y ago

inportb 12y ago
> Most applications written in the past 50 years have been taught to wait for data, assuming that the memory systems feeding the main computers chips are slow. ... and they'd still have to wait for data, knowing that modern apps love pulling data from the network.
deleted 12y ago
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dvanduzer 12y ago
Is this about a storage breakthrough with memristors, about alternatives to Von Neumann architecture, or just an incomprehensible press release?
- joezydeco 12y ago
  A little of each. The article got kind of meta at the end. "Any delivery date has to be taken with some skepticism given that HP has been hyping the memristor technology for years and failed to meet earlier self-imposed deadlines."
  - justincormack 12y ago
    A little of each, but a lot of money being thrown at it, three quarters of HP research.
achille 12y ago
I encourage folks to watch this tech talk by HP Research Labs on the discovery of the memristor and implementation details. It goes into the gory technical details, from the low level physics to the construction of the gates, the truth tables, and the high level computation possibilities once chips are assembled in a crossbar package. > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY
- tedsanders 12y ago
  Thanks very much for sharing this video. Despite having a background in electrical engineering and device physics, I've never really understood what a memristor was until watching this.
- danmaz74 12y ago
  Thanks for the video! It should be the first comment for this thread. I... retweeted it :)
- mbell 12y ago
  Any idea if their materials have changed? He speaks of Platinum and Titanium Dioxide as the materials they are using. Even discounting the cost of spinning up the necessary fabrication facilities, I would think such materials would keep the costs prohibitive for mass adoption.
  - comboy 12y ago
    In the nano scale I would imagine that the material cost is not the biggest issue
  - regularfry 12y ago
    Platinum has a long history in industrial applications, often in surprising quantities. There's got to be a few orders of magnitude more of it in a catalytic converter than you would want on a chip die. Titanium dioxide is better known as white paint pigment. Or sunscreen. People smear it on their skin in large quantities. It's not what you'd call scarce.
- charonn0 12y ago
  If I understand this right (I'm not an electrical engineer) a hypothetical memristor-based computer would not need discrete RAM and disk storage nor would it have a fixed processing power. Rather, the chip of memristors would simultaneously be acting as the CPU and as non-volatile primary memory with the speed and efficiency of DRAM (or better). Additionally, the number of memristors dedicated to computation vs. storage could be changed in real time on a live system. This absolutely blows my mind.
api 12y ago
Seems like a test platform for memristor tech.
- oddevan 12y ago
  Is there a better way to test a tech than to make a product with it?
  - valarauca1 12y ago
    Well they announced it cautiously back in 2006, popular science ran an article on it. They've done some press mainly with EE magazines since then. This technology has been in R&D for nearly a decade. I figure it pretty mature.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      > This technology has been in R&D for nearly a decade. I figure it pretty mature. Funny, I read that the exact opposite way. If it was mature we'd be seeing products.
      - valarauca1 12y ago
        >Martin Fink, the chief technology officer and head of HP Labs, who is expected to unveil HP’s plans at a conference Wednesday.
        jacquesm 12y ago
        Plans are not products, but let's wait and see before we get all happy.
        rogerdpack 12y ago
        Yeah my thought too--I'll believe it when they actually release a product. It's like most research projects--initial results are great. Having it on the market means it really exists though...
cliveowen 12y ago
I so much want this to be true, I can't wait for it. Not having a layered memory architecture means no VM, everything has be rethought from the filesystem down. On a related note: "Operating systems have not been taught what to do with all of this memory, and HP will have to get very creative." Anyone knows what this could possibly mean?
- sp332 12y ago
  Well, you wouldn't have to save files. You could just use a data structure in main memory because it's non-volatile. But how would you share data between programs when there's no disk? And you could execute binaries directly from storage without "loading" them into memory first. But you'd have to keep an original copy somewhere in case it modifies itself as it runs.
  - markbnj 12y ago
    You'd probably still have memory partitioned into persistent areas and runtime heap of a sort, and you might very well continue to use the file system metaphor because it still makes sense to humans. Whether a file is bits on magnetic disk, in flash memory, or fast persistent RAM isn't all that meaningful to the user. As for sharing, I don't see why this would be an issue. If you have to move memory contents between machines then you still need some sort of external transport, whether it is a network, or a glowing glass cube.
    - hderms 12y ago
      Took the words right out of my mouth (better said, of course).
    - sp332 12y ago
      Filesystem semantics are a bottleneck. Fusion IO had to get rid of them when they demoed their billion-IOPS platform last year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3434711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3434711 For communicating data between programs, would you create a filesystem object that points to memory inside your program, or what?
untothebreach 12y ago
Link to the printable version, for those who don't like paginated stories: > http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/206401-with-the-machine-hp-may-have-invented-a-new-kind-of-computer http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/206401-with-the...
- danielweber 12y ago
  It also correctly works with PageDown.
- dang 12y ago
  Thanks. We changed the url to that.
Shivetya 12y ago
as for a new OS, single level store OSes should work just fine in such an environment.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  Various forms of naming hierarchies and tag databases are more natural for humans, though, than a numbered array.
valarauca1 12y ago
A memristor is the 4th fundamental circuit component, along with capacitors, resistors, and inductors. The important part of memristors is that they can be arranged to form a crossbar latch, which acts like a transistor. This crossbar latches are very very small, and very low power. HP plans on achieving data density of 100GB/cm^2 [1] with read write speeds approximately 100x faster then flash memory while using 1% of the energy. Also with lower energy costs, expected data density is 1 Petabyte per cm^3 (due to 3D stacked circuitry) Basically when this technology comes of age we'll see smart phones reach the order of terabytes of storage. [1] http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1168454 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1168454
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  > Basically when this technology comes of age we'll see smart phones reach the order of terabytes of storage. Looking forward to carrying the library of congress, netflix's entire catalog, and all of openstreetmap on my phone in the next 5 years.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    Software grows to match the hardware. If storage goes up 100x, data will grow to accommodate. Some things won't grow, to be sure. Anything text-based, for example. But movies, music, pictures... would probably all explode in fidelity and thus size.
    - viraptor 12y ago
      Would movies and music really explode? Music hit the ceiling long time ago - nobody's going to go for higher resolution / sampling rate than the current "uncompressed" sound. Big publishers are intentionally sacrificing the quality for loudness anyway. Movies can practically scale up to retina-equivalent on wall-size equivalent only. Even then not many people will want TVs bigger than they can look at without moving their eyes... Pictures could still grow, especially the internal raw representation taken from the light capturing element, but that's likely to be down-scaled when saving to kill noise. What else is there that really takes space? (that is not limited by the effective resolution of human senses)
twic 12y ago
It really is incredible, the innovation that comes out of these Silicon Valley startups!
- kansface 12y ago
  Startups can't throw a billion dollars and a decade at a MVP. This is not an argument against startups.
- DevX101 12y ago
  HP hasn't been a startup since World War II
jawns 12y ago
For those of you who are unfamiliar with what a memristor is, as I was, HP has an easy-to-understand analogy on its FAQ page about memristors: "A common analogy for a resistor is a pipe that carries water. The water itself is analogous to electrical charge, the pressure at the input of the pipe is similar to voltage, and the rate of flow of the water through the pipe is like electrical current. Just as with an electrical resistor, the flow of water through the pipe is faster if the pipe is shorter and/or it has a larger diameter. An analogy for a memristor is an interesting kind of pipe that expands or shrinks when water flows through it. If water flows through the pipe in one direction, the diameter of the pipe increases, thus enabling the water to flow faster. If water flows through the pipe in the opposite direction, the diameter of the pipe decreases, thus slowing down the flow of water. If the water pressure is turned off, the pipe will retain it most recent diameter until the water is turned back on. Thus, the pipe does not store water like a bucket (or a capacitor) – it remembers how much water flowed through it." Source: http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2008/apr-jun/memristor_faq.html http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2008/apr-jun/memristor_faq.html
- boyaka 12y ago
  That made me think of a chinese finger trap.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- frik 12y ago
  Conceptual symmetry between the resistor, capacitor, inductor, and the memristor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor#mediaviewer/File:Two-terminal_non-linear_circuit_elements.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor#mediaviewer/File:Two-... The scales fell from my eyes. Now the electronics math makes sense - Memristor was the missing puzzle piece.
  - swimfar 12y ago
    That reminds me of the missing mechanical equivalent of the capacitor, the inerter, which McLaren secretly began using on their formula one cars in 2005. But does this mean there's potentially another missing suspension component? http://personal.strath.ac.uk/yixiang.xu/talk_HUST_2008_Chen.pdf http://personal.strath.ac.uk/yixiang.xu/talk_HUST_2008_Chen.... edit: Assuming a Force-Current, Velocity-Voltage equivalence, I get the mechanical memristor behavior to be: dx=M.F.dt, with M being a property of the memristor(memdamper?). Or in other words, v=M.F; velocity is proportional to the force. (The dots are multiplication. Asterisks italicize the text)
al2o3cr 12y ago
Sounds really neat, but "2017 - next decade" is the engineering estimate version of "sometime, maybe never".
- moonlighter 12y ago
  Yup. They lost me at "The company says it will bring the Machine to market within the next few years".
  - vram22 12y ago
    I have my doubts too. Also the announcement looks a bit like the earlier case of HP almost betting the company on the acquisition of Autonomy (if that was the right name of that company it acquired a few years ago, before writing it off).
squigs25 12y ago
Soooo... this is basically just persistent memory right? HP has been working on the memristor since 2008. Memristors have already been produced in labs by U of Michigan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor This article seeks to give the image that this is a novel idea that investors can take advantage of. In reality, it is not.
- DelwinAmber 12y ago
  There's a huge difference between the lab and a production model.
- mitchty 12y ago
  Actually, the cool bit about memristors is that you could treat them like both a transistor for computation or for memory, or flip. Like an fpga. So imagine the difference in an operating system that could retain its running image between reboots, and not have to distinguish things like stack/heap. And could reconfigure more computing resources on the fly and back again. It is... a very different view of computing. Exciting though.
  - colanderman 12y ago
    So imagine the difference in an operating system that could retain its running image between reboots What do you mean by this? This sounds like hibernation to me. not have to distinguish things like stack/heap I'm lost here too. This is a distinction that is made for purposes of program structure, not to kotow to demands of hardware.
    - trebor 12y ago
      Okay, imagine that to put your computer into hibernation mode all you need to do is hit the power button. This is instantaneous because none of the data has to be synced to permanent memory, because it's already in permanent, non-volatile memory. I'm not sure what he means by distinguishing between stack/heap either.
cwyers 12y ago
"HP’s bet is the memristor, a nanoscale chip that Labs researchers must build and handle in full anticontamination clean-room suits." So... it's a chip.
- angersock 12y ago
  Is it web scale? Can we make it social?
  - bkurtz13 12y ago
    Obviously; it's been designed upfront to be SOLOMO.
    - jtokoph 12y ago
      It's too bad they haven't caught up to MoLoSo yet.
  - vram22 12y ago
    Will it be able to drive itself? Or think?
- trebor 12y ago
  See some of the other answers. The memristor is not a chip, but the 4th fundamental electrical component; the chip is a hybrid memory/storage chip using memristors (instead of platters or capacitors). Because of its nature it demands a pretty thorough reimagining of processing data.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    What he's saying is that that particular aspect of how they're made (required a clean room) is nothing special.
rasz_pl 12y ago
TLDR they are hyping up Memristors and hinting at HP trying to bundle it with some of their proprietary crap if/when they finally deliver.
- LaikaF 12y ago
  You know a lot of programs that know how to use memristors?
  - angersock 12y ago
    That's...it's not...goddamnit. That's what we have drivers and operating systems for. :(
  - joezydeco 12y ago
    All of them? It's just another type of non-volatile storage.
    - caster_cp 12y ago
      I think the point here is not "knowing how to use memristors". Sure, it is possible to use them simply as another type of non-volatile memory. But it's the same as having an airplane and driving it on the road. Memristors, the way they are hyped, promise to be orders of magnitude smaller, faster, cheaper AND less energy consuming than all of the other memories that exist. All at the same time. If time proves this all to be true, it can bring really groundbreaking changes to computing. And we all will be able to watch more funny cat videos, at a greater resolution.
  - TallGuyShort 12y ago
    No, but I can name a lot of programs where the authors never even considered how hard disks or RAM worked.
  - reitzensteinm 12y ago
    There are quite a few smug replies to you, but my siblings are missing that the interesting thing about memristors is their potential for putting dynamically configurable computation (using implication logic) directly inside high density storage. Taking advantage of such systems will not be business as usual, it'll look even more foreign to us than CUDA does to a Javascript developer. Sure, you can use an interface and use them just like a regular storage device, but until and unless you can get the cost per bit below flash it's not interesting at all. If that was all memristors could do, it's not even clear that they would be in active development - this is a moon shot by HP (no pun intended).
deleted 12y ago
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grondilu 12y ago
Totally bought ten shares of HPQ after learning about that. Who knows, their plan might actually work. Go HP!
- lucb1e 12y ago
  I bet Businessweek has some too, the way it's written.
wmf 12y ago
Yet another article about HP's future monopoly on computing that doesn't mention PCM, RRAM, STT-RAM, etc.
Arjuna 12y ago
Dr. Leon Ong Chua [1] wrote this paper [2] in 1971 entitled, Memristor - The Missing Circuit Element, where he first outlined the theory of the memristor. Admittedly, this is not my field, so my fascination may appear to be quite naive to the well-initiated, but I find it simply intriguing that the memristor was first theorized to exist; that is, it is somewhat analogous to the Higgs boson, in that the mathematics precedes the discovery. To my point (from the paper): "Although no physical memristor has yet been discovered in the form of a physical device without internal power supply, the circuit-theoretic and quasi-static electromagnetic analyses presented in Sections III and IV make plausible the notion that a memristor device with a monotonically increasing φ-q curve could be invented, if not discovered accidentally." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_O._Chua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_O._Chua [2] http://www.cpmt.org/scv/meetings/chua.pdf http://www.cpmt.org/scv/meetings/chua.pdf
- perlgeek 12y ago
  Another thing that has been predicted by theory first was the laser: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser#History
- jahewson 12y ago
  Indeed, electromagnetic waves were theorized by James Clark Maxwell and later shown to exist five years later by Heinrich Hertz. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Hertz#Electromagnetic_research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Hertz#Electromagnetic_...
- gdewilde 12y ago
  The theory was revolutionary of course but the properties had already been observed in "unusable" semiconductor materials. They had the pinched hysteresis loops in the 70's.
drcode 12y ago
It seems to me HP saw the marketing power of "Watson" (a platform for marketing AI technologies) and are trying to create "The Machine" to build a marketing platform around advanced computer architecture concepts. Just like IBM had at least a few interesting ideas to give Watson credibility, HP hopes its memristor work will give "The Machine" enough credibility that they won't get laughed out of the room once they parade it around the MSM.
tlb 12y ago
If you want to start developing for this class of machine, you can build a prototype using DRAM, which is equivalent as long as the power stays on.
rogerdpack 12y ago
My first thought is "whoa, they are going to have to figure out how to make those screaming fast to be able to keep up with the speed of SSD's by the time memristors are released" (though I guess the appeal of practically unlimited storage is nice...)
christianbryant 12y ago
I'm looking forward to the list of exploits that emerge post-release. Exciting stuff, particularly in terms of moving OS development forward independent of the usual suspects.
marvin 12y ago
In case there's anyone in here who knows: Why does the Wikipedia page for memristors say that this 4th circuit element is proven to be impossible to create in physical reality, due tp the laws of thermodynamics? Either HP must be lying, physics must be wrong or whomever figured out this "proof" must have screwed up.
- guelo 12y ago
  or Wikipedia is wrong or you misread Wikipedia.
- VikingCoder 12y ago
  I think there's STILL debate about whether you can actually make a REAL memristor, or whether you can merely make something that behaves exactly as a memristor would. So, in theory you can't make one, but in practice you can. Something like that.
  - lucb1e 12y ago
    > make a REAL memristor, or whether you can merely make something that behaves exactly as a memristor would. Alan Turing would say there is no difference.
ambler0 12y ago
From the last paragraph: "The Machine isn’t on HP’s official roadmap. Fink says it could arrive as early as 2017 or take until the end of the decade. Any delivery date has to be taken with some skepticism given that HP has been hyping the memristor technology for years and failed to meet earlier self-imposed deadlines." So, does anyone actually know whether significant new progress is being made on this project, or is this article just a win for HP's PR department and nothing more?
- ableal 12y ago
  Well, in the past there was also some hoopla about IBM's Josephson junction and Intel's bubble memories. After a few years, the subject goes away to die in encyclopedia articles. If you do not have a viable product after six years, the outlook is bleak ...
yellowapple 12y ago
That's pretty awesome. Memristors are very promising for creating fast, high-density, non-volatile storage, and it's good to see that HP's seeing that in the midst of the solid-state flash memory craze and working on commercial applications for them. What's also awesome is that - according to the article - HP plans on open-sourcing its custom "Machine OS"; rather refreshing coming from a company that's traditionally released its own operating systems under non-free licenses. I'm not normally a fan of HP (aside from their printers), but seeing them go after this kind of stuff is certainly exciting.
DonGateley 12y ago
They talk about memristors being the fourth type of circuit element and the final element at that. It's just a resistor with memory. i.e. its R value can be changed by current and remembered. Wouldn't an inductor with memory in the sense that it's L is changed by voltage or current and remembered be a fifth and a capacitor with a C that is changed and remembered be sixth?
scythe 12y ago
There's a catch, of course -- always a catch: a truly nonvolatile memristor violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But see: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n4/abs/ncomms2784.html http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n4/abs/ncomms2784.ht... (open access) The physics is (unsurprisingly) rather involved and I don't have time to decipher it, but, yeah, here's the guts.
haberman 12y ago
> “If you want to really rethink computing architecture, we’re the only game in town now,” he said. Another way of putting this: because of patents, we're in a privileged position of being the only people who are allowed to work on this problem. So instead of the whole world rushing to make something interesting with this new tech, we get a group of people working in an ivory tower trying to come up with the perfect thing. If we're lucky, they'll execute well and deliver a compelling product that they have monopoly power over for 10 years, or however long the patents last. If we're not lucky, they'll bumble around like cable providers trying to develop "valuable add-ons", and the only reason they'll have any success is because no one is allowed to compete with them. Sorry if that's overly pessimistic, but that's how this article came off to me. I guess patents do have the benefit that we are getting to hear about this development at all instead of it being a tightly-controlled trade secret. And this kind of payoff is what funds the R&D gamble to begin with. I just hope that they actually deliver reusable parts that other people can build into bigger innovations instead of trying to control the innovations themselves.
- ohitsdom 12y ago
  I don't think it's a patent issue so much as a question of resources. Sure, Google, Apple, Microsoft and others have the resources to develop a similar machine, but a new type of computer would wipe out their business model in a much more devastating manner than HP. HP has the resources, but also isn't enjoying too much success to scare away this risk.
  - chatmasta 12y ago
    Or, on the other hand, Google/Apple/MSFT are actually incentivized to research this technology, precisely because it could disrupt their revenue. When new technology 5-10 years down the road threatens your present business model, it makes sense to research it so that you're prepared to adapt when it arrives.
  - haberman 12y ago
    You don't think the fact that HP has a bunch of patents around this sort of disincentives others? Also I'm not seeing how radically denser/faster storage is going to make search engine or consumer device business models tank.
marincounty 12y ago
HP need to show up at my door with a check for $599.00 plus tax for a laptop that I used 5 times and died on the day of 366! Nerds remember. I don't think this Podunk company realizes once you lose a customer, you lose them for a long time. The reverse is true; once a male buys a product he likes--you have a customer for life. It's taught in every business school? Men just want the dam thing to work? Oh, and hire a CEO who knows a little bit about engineering? That last sentence goes to all hardware companies.
Eleutheria 12y ago
> could replace a data center’s worth of equipment with a single refrigerator-size machine Ten years later it will fit in your pocket.
chrisweekly 12y ago
Now THIS is "Hacker News". Perhaps a slightly unlikely source (does businessweek usually have this quality?) but v interesting article and discussion here. Sorry not to be adding more substantively to it, just glad it's here. :)
mathattack 12y ago
I am happy to see them emerging as an R&D power. They haven't had much to show for themselves lately, so I wish them well on this.
bayesianhorse 12y ago
The government has a secret system: a machine ...
alyxr 12y ago
What's the long-term reliability/durability of memristors? Do they die after too many reads or writes?
rntz 12y ago
The article mentions that > Fink has assigned one team to develop the open-source Machine OS, which will assume the availability of a high-speed, constant memory store. I have to ask: if this is open-source, where is it? Perhaps my google-fu is weak, but I can't find anything but news articles talking about "The Machine". EDIT: Aha, found mention in some articles that it "will be made" open source. Future tense. That makes more sense.
shmerl 12y ago
> Fink has assigned one team to develop the open-source Machine OS, which will assume the availability of a high-speed, constant memory store. It's great that they decided to make it open from the start.
jayantsethi 12y ago
Can someone please explain how can light be used to transfer data in computers?
- PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  I assume they're talking about fiber optics, or something similar. An optical fiber "wire" made of silica or plastic carries photons the way copper carries electrons. Most telecom trunks use them these days. The only thing is that I've never heard of fiber optics being used inside a machine, only to connect one machine to another. I imagine the principles are similar, though.
goblin89 12y ago
This computer may take as long as a decade to build, according to the article. Why did HP choose to reveal their hand so early? Isn't it preferable to take everyone (especially competitors) by surprise?
sushirain 12y ago
The biggest difference the memristor brings is to Machine Learning. The memristor is a first step towards a hardware implementation of Hebb's rule - "neurons that fire together wire together". Hebb's rule variants are used in machine learning algorithms to do things like web-search, image/object recognition, etc. (Specifically, Hebb's rule can be used to compute PCA.) It's interesting to note that the brain does not have separate components for memory and computation. Every neuron computes and stores at the same time.
- Houshalter 12y ago
  I don't think that's correct. Doesn't the hippo campus store memories?
srbryers 12y ago
Professor F(r)ink??

595 points by justincormack 12y ago

> Most applications written in the past 50 years have been taught to wait for data, assuming that the memory systems feeding the main computers chips are slow. ... and they'd still have to wait for data, knowing that modern apps love pulling data from the network.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

dvanduzer 12y ago

Is this about a storage breakthrough with memristors, about alternatives to Von Neumann architecture, or just an incomprehensible press release?

joezydeco 12y ago
A little of each. The article got kind of meta at the end. "Any delivery date has to be taken with some skepticism given that HP has been hyping the memristor technology for years and failed to meet earlier self-imposed deadlines."
- justincormack 12y ago
  A little of each, but a lot of money being thrown at it, three quarters of HP research.

achille 12y ago

I encourage folks to watch this tech talk by HP Research Labs on the discovery of the memristor and implementation details. It goes into the gory technical details, from the low level physics to the construction of the gates, the truth tables, and the high level computation possibilities once chips are assembled in a crossbar package. > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY

tedsanders 12y ago
Thanks very much for sharing this video. Despite having a background in electrical engineering and device physics, I've never really understood what a memristor was until watching this.
danmaz74 12y ago
Thanks for the video! It should be the first comment for this thread. I... retweeted it :)
mbell 12y ago
Any idea if their materials have changed? He speaks of Platinum and Titanium Dioxide as the materials they are using. Even discounting the cost of spinning up the necessary fabrication facilities, I would think such materials would keep the costs prohibitive for mass adoption.
- comboy 12y ago
  In the nano scale I would imagine that the material cost is not the biggest issue
- regularfry 12y ago
  Platinum has a long history in industrial applications, often in surprising quantities. There's got to be a few orders of magnitude more of it in a catalytic converter than you would want on a chip die. Titanium dioxide is better known as white paint pigment. Or sunscreen. People smear it on their skin in large quantities. It's not what you'd call scarce.
charonn0 12y ago
If I understand this right (I'm not an electrical engineer) a hypothetical memristor-based computer would not need discrete RAM and disk storage nor would it have a fixed processing power. Rather, the chip of memristors would simultaneously be acting as the CPU and as non-volatile primary memory with the speed and efficiency of DRAM (or better). Additionally, the number of memristors dedicated to computation vs. storage could be changed in real time on a live system. This absolutely blows my mind.

api 12y ago

Seems like a test platform for memristor tech.

oddevan 12y ago
Is there a better way to test a tech than to make a product with it?
- valarauca1 12y ago
  Well they announced it cautiously back in 2006, popular science ran an article on it. They've done some press mainly with EE magazines since then. This technology has been in R&D for nearly a decade. I figure it pretty mature.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    > This technology has been in R&D for nearly a decade. I figure it pretty mature. Funny, I read that the exact opposite way. If it was mature we'd be seeing products.
    - valarauca1 12y ago
      >Martin Fink, the chief technology officer and head of HP Labs, who is expected to unveil HP’s plans at a conference Wednesday.
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        Plans are not products, but let's wait and see before we get all happy.
        rogerdpack 12y ago
        Yeah my thought too--I'll believe it when they actually release a product. It's like most research projects--initial results are great. Having it on the market means it really exists though...

cliveowen 12y ago

I so much want this to be true, I can't wait for it. Not having a layered memory architecture means no VM, everything has be rethought from the filesystem down. On a related note: "Operating systems have not been taught what to do with all of this memory, and HP will have to get very creative." Anyone knows what this could possibly mean?

sp332 12y ago
Well, you wouldn't have to save files. You could just use a data structure in main memory because it's non-volatile. But how would you share data between programs when there's no disk? And you could execute binaries directly from storage without "loading" them into memory first. But you'd have to keep an original copy somewhere in case it modifies itself as it runs.
- markbnj 12y ago
  You'd probably still have memory partitioned into persistent areas and runtime heap of a sort, and you might very well continue to use the file system metaphor because it still makes sense to humans. Whether a file is bits on magnetic disk, in flash memory, or fast persistent RAM isn't all that meaningful to the user. As for sharing, I don't see why this would be an issue. If you have to move memory contents between machines then you still need some sort of external transport, whether it is a network, or a glowing glass cube.
  - hderms 12y ago
    Took the words right out of my mouth (better said, of course).
  - sp332 12y ago
    Filesystem semantics are a bottleneck. Fusion IO had to get rid of them when they demoed their billion-IOPS platform last year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3434711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3434711 For communicating data between programs, would you create a filesystem object that points to memory inside your program, or what?

untothebreach 12y ago

Link to the printable version, for those who don't like paginated stories: > http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/206401-with-the-machine-hp-may-have-invented-a-new-kind-of-computer http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/206401-with-the...

danielweber 12y ago
It also correctly works with PageDown.
dang 12y ago
Thanks. We changed the url to that.

Shivetya 12y ago

as for a new OS, single level store OSes should work just fine in such an environment.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago
Various forms of naming hierarchies and tag databases are more natural for humans, though, than a numbered array.

valarauca1 12y ago

A memristor is the 4th fundamental circuit component, along with capacitors, resistors, and inductors. The important part of memristors is that they can be arranged to form a crossbar latch, which acts like a transistor. This crossbar latches are very very small, and very low power. HP plans on achieving data density of 100GB/cm^2 [1] with read write speeds approximately 100x faster then flash memory while using 1% of the energy. Also with lower energy costs, expected data density is 1 Petabyte per cm^3 (due to 3D stacked circuitry) Basically when this technology comes of age we'll see smart phones reach the order of terabytes of storage. [1] http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1168454 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1168454

toomuchtodo 12y ago
> Basically when this technology comes of age we'll see smart phones reach the order of terabytes of storage. Looking forward to carrying the library of congress, netflix's entire catalog, and all of openstreetmap on my phone in the next 5 years.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  Software grows to match the hardware. If storage goes up 100x, data will grow to accommodate. Some things won't grow, to be sure. Anything text-based, for example. But movies, music, pictures... would probably all explode in fidelity and thus size.
  - viraptor 12y ago
    Would movies and music really explode? Music hit the ceiling long time ago - nobody's going to go for higher resolution / sampling rate than the current "uncompressed" sound. Big publishers are intentionally sacrificing the quality for loudness anyway. Movies can practically scale up to retina-equivalent on wall-size equivalent only. Even then not many people will want TVs bigger than they can look at without moving their eyes... Pictures could still grow, especially the internal raw representation taken from the light capturing element, but that's likely to be down-scaled when saving to kill noise. What else is there that really takes space? (that is not limited by the effective resolution of human senses)

twic 12y ago

It really is incredible, the innovation that comes out of these Silicon Valley startups!

kansface 12y ago
Startups can't throw a billion dollars and a decade at a MVP. This is not an argument against startups.
DevX101 12y ago
HP hasn't been a startup since World War II

jawns 12y ago

For those of you who are unfamiliar with what a memristor is, as I was, HP has an easy-to-understand analogy on its FAQ page about memristors: "A common analogy for a resistor is a pipe that carries water. The water itself is analogous to electrical charge, the pressure at the input of the pipe is similar to voltage, and the rate of flow of the water through the pipe is like electrical current. Just as with an electrical resistor, the flow of water through the pipe is faster if the pipe is shorter and/or it has a larger diameter. An analogy for a memristor is an interesting kind of pipe that expands or shrinks when water flows through it. If water flows through the pipe in one direction, the diameter of the pipe increases, thus enabling the water to flow faster. If water flows through the pipe in the opposite direction, the diameter of the pipe decreases, thus slowing down the flow of water. If the water pressure is turned off, the pipe will retain it most recent diameter until the water is turned back on. Thus, the pipe does not store water like a bucket (or a capacitor) – it remembers how much water flowed through it." Source: http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2008/apr-jun/memristor_faq.html http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2008/apr-jun/memristor_faq.html

boyaka 12y ago
That made me think of a chinese finger trap.
deleted 12y ago
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frik 12y ago
Conceptual symmetry between the resistor, capacitor, inductor, and the memristor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor#mediaviewer/File:Two-terminal_non-linear_circuit_elements.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor#mediaviewer/File:Two-... The scales fell from my eyes. Now the electronics math makes sense - Memristor was the missing puzzle piece.
- swimfar 12y ago
  That reminds me of the missing mechanical equivalent of the capacitor, the inerter, which McLaren secretly began using on their formula one cars in 2005. But does this mean there's potentially another missing suspension component? http://personal.strath.ac.uk/yixiang.xu/talk_HUST_2008_Chen.pdf http://personal.strath.ac.uk/yixiang.xu/talk_HUST_2008_Chen.... edit: Assuming a Force-Current, Velocity-Voltage equivalence, I get the mechanical memristor behavior to be: dx=M.F.dt, with M being a property of the memristor(memdamper?). Or in other words, v=M.F; velocity is proportional to the force. (The dots are multiplication. Asterisks italicize the text)

al2o3cr 12y ago

Sounds really neat, but "2017 - next decade" is the engineering estimate version of "sometime, maybe never".

moonlighter 12y ago
Yup. They lost me at "The company says it will bring the Machine to market within the next few years".
- vram22 12y ago
  I have my doubts too. Also the announcement looks a bit like the earlier case of HP almost betting the company on the acquisition of Autonomy (if that was the right name of that company it acquired a few years ago, before writing it off).

squigs25 12y ago

Soooo... this is basically just persistent memory right? HP has been working on the memristor since 2008. Memristors have already been produced in labs by U of Michigan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor This article seeks to give the image that this is a novel idea that investors can take advantage of. In reality, it is not.

DelwinAmber 12y ago
There's a huge difference between the lab and a production model.
mitchty 12y ago
Actually, the cool bit about memristors is that you could treat them like both a transistor for computation or for memory, or flip. Like an fpga. So imagine the difference in an operating system that could retain its running image between reboots, and not have to distinguish things like stack/heap. And could reconfigure more computing resources on the fly and back again. It is... a very different view of computing. Exciting though.
- colanderman 12y ago
  So imagine the difference in an operating system that could retain its running image between reboots What do you mean by this? This sounds like hibernation to me. not have to distinguish things like stack/heap I'm lost here too. This is a distinction that is made for purposes of program structure, not to kotow to demands of hardware.
  - trebor 12y ago
    Okay, imagine that to put your computer into hibernation mode all you need to do is hit the power button. This is instantaneous because none of the data has to be synced to permanent memory, because it's already in permanent, non-volatile memory. I'm not sure what he means by distinguishing between stack/heap either.

cwyers 12y ago

"HP’s bet is the memristor, a nanoscale chip that Labs researchers must build and handle in full anticontamination clean-room suits." So... it's a chip.

angersock 12y ago
Is it web scale? Can we make it social?
- bkurtz13 12y ago
  Obviously; it's been designed upfront to be SOLOMO.
  - jtokoph 12y ago
    It's too bad they haven't caught up to MoLoSo yet.
- vram22 12y ago
  Will it be able to drive itself? Or think?
trebor 12y ago
See some of the other answers. The memristor is not a chip, but the 4th fundamental electrical component; the chip is a hybrid memory/storage chip using memristors (instead of platters or capacitors). Because of its nature it demands a pretty thorough reimagining of processing data.
- mikeash 12y ago
  What he's saying is that that particular aspect of how they're made (required a clean room) is nothing special.

rasz_pl 12y ago

TLDR they are hyping up Memristors and hinting at HP trying to bundle it with some of their proprietary crap if/when they finally deliver.

LaikaF 12y ago
You know a lot of programs that know how to use memristors?
- angersock 12y ago
  That's...it's not...goddamnit. That's what we have drivers and operating systems for. :(
- joezydeco 12y ago
  All of them? It's just another type of non-volatile storage.
  - caster_cp 12y ago
    I think the point here is not "knowing how to use memristors". Sure, it is possible to use them simply as another type of non-volatile memory. But it's the same as having an airplane and driving it on the road. Memristors, the way they are hyped, promise to be orders of magnitude smaller, faster, cheaper AND less energy consuming than all of the other memories that exist. All at the same time. If time proves this all to be true, it can bring really groundbreaking changes to computing. And we all will be able to watch more funny cat videos, at a greater resolution.
- TallGuyShort 12y ago
  No, but I can name a lot of programs where the authors never even considered how hard disks or RAM worked.
- reitzensteinm 12y ago
  There are quite a few smug replies to you, but my siblings are missing that the interesting thing about memristors is their potential for putting dynamically configurable computation (using implication logic) directly inside high density storage. Taking advantage of such systems will not be business as usual, it'll look even more foreign to us than CUDA does to a Javascript developer. Sure, you can use an interface and use them just like a regular storage device, but until and unless you can get the cost per bit below flash it's not interesting at all. If that was all memristors could do, it's not even clear that they would be in active development - this is a moon shot by HP (no pun intended).

deleted 12y ago

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grondilu 12y ago

Totally bought ten shares of HPQ after learning about that. Who knows, their plan might actually work. Go HP!

lucb1e 12y ago
I bet Businessweek has some too, the way it's written.

wmf 12y ago

Yet another article about HP's future monopoly on computing that doesn't mention PCM, RRAM, STT-RAM, etc.

Arjuna 12y ago

Dr. Leon Ong Chua [1] wrote this paper [2] in 1971 entitled, Memristor - The Missing Circuit Element, where he first outlined the theory of the memristor. Admittedly, this is not my field, so my fascination may appear to be quite naive to the well-initiated, but I find it simply intriguing that the memristor was first theorized to exist; that is, it is somewhat analogous to the Higgs boson, in that the mathematics precedes the discovery. To my point (from the paper): "Although no physical memristor has yet been discovered in the form of a physical device without internal power supply, the circuit-theoretic and quasi-static electromagnetic analyses presented in Sections III and IV make plausible the notion that a memristor device with a monotonically increasing φ-q curve could be invented, if not discovered accidentally." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_O._Chua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_O._Chua [2] http://www.cpmt.org/scv/meetings/chua.pdf http://www.cpmt.org/scv/meetings/chua.pdf

perlgeek 12y ago
Another thing that has been predicted by theory first was the laser: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser#History
jahewson 12y ago
Indeed, electromagnetic waves were theorized by James Clark Maxwell and later shown to exist five years later by Heinrich Hertz. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Hertz#Electromagnetic_research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Hertz#Electromagnetic_...
gdewilde 12y ago
The theory was revolutionary of course but the properties had already been observed in "unusable" semiconductor materials. They had the pinched hysteresis loops in the 70's.

drcode 12y ago

It seems to me HP saw the marketing power of "Watson" (a platform for marketing AI technologies) and are trying to create "The Machine" to build a marketing platform around advanced computer architecture concepts. Just like IBM had at least a few interesting ideas to give Watson credibility, HP hopes its memristor work will give "The Machine" enough credibility that they won't get laughed out of the room once they parade it around the MSM.

tlb 12y ago

If you want to start developing for this class of machine, you can build a prototype using DRAM, which is equivalent as long as the power stays on.

rogerdpack 12y ago

My first thought is "whoa, they are going to have to figure out how to make those screaming fast to be able to keep up with the speed of SSD's by the time memristors are released" (though I guess the appeal of practically unlimited storage is nice...)

christianbryant 12y ago

I'm looking forward to the list of exploits that emerge post-release. Exciting stuff, particularly in terms of moving OS development forward independent of the usual suspects.

marvin 12y ago

In case there's anyone in here who knows: Why does the Wikipedia page for memristors say that this 4th circuit element is proven to be impossible to create in physical reality, due tp the laws of thermodynamics? Either HP must be lying, physics must be wrong or whomever figured out this "proof" must have screwed up.

guelo 12y ago
or Wikipedia is wrong or you misread Wikipedia.
VikingCoder 12y ago
I think there's STILL debate about whether you can actually make a REAL memristor, or whether you can merely make something that behaves exactly as a memristor would. So, in theory you can't make one, but in practice you can. Something like that.
- lucb1e 12y ago
  > make a REAL memristor, or whether you can merely make something that behaves exactly as a memristor would. Alan Turing would say there is no difference.

ambler0 12y ago

From the last paragraph: "The Machine isn’t on HP’s official roadmap. Fink says it could arrive as early as 2017 or take until the end of the decade. Any delivery date has to be taken with some skepticism given that HP has been hyping the memristor technology for years and failed to meet earlier self-imposed deadlines." So, does anyone actually know whether significant new progress is being made on this project, or is this article just a win for HP's PR department and nothing more?

ableal 12y ago
Well, in the past there was also some hoopla about IBM's Josephson junction and Intel's bubble memories. After a few years, the subject goes away to die in encyclopedia articles. If you do not have a viable product after six years, the outlook is bleak ...

yellowapple 12y ago

That's pretty awesome. Memristors are very promising for creating fast, high-density, non-volatile storage, and it's good to see that HP's seeing that in the midst of the solid-state flash memory craze and working on commercial applications for them. What's also awesome is that - according to the article - HP plans on open-sourcing its custom "Machine OS"; rather refreshing coming from a company that's traditionally released its own operating systems under non-free licenses. I'm not normally a fan of HP (aside from their printers), but seeing them go after this kind of stuff is certainly exciting.

DonGateley 12y ago

They talk about memristors being the fourth type of circuit element and the final element at that. It's just a resistor with memory. i.e. its R value can be changed by current and remembered. Wouldn't an inductor with memory in the sense that it's L is changed by voltage or current and remembered be a fifth and a capacitor with a C that is changed and remembered be sixth?

scythe 12y ago

There's a catch, of course -- always a catch: a truly nonvolatile memristor violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But see: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n4/abs/ncomms2784.html http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n4/abs/ncomms2784.ht... (open access) The physics is (unsurprisingly) rather involved and I don't have time to decipher it, but, yeah, here's the guts.

haberman 12y ago

> “If you want to really rethink computing architecture, we’re the only game in town now,” he said. Another way of putting this: because of patents, we're in a privileged position of being the only people who are allowed to work on this problem. So instead of the whole world rushing to make something interesting with this new tech, we get a group of people working in an ivory tower trying to come up with the perfect thing. If we're lucky, they'll execute well and deliver a compelling product that they have monopoly power over for 10 years, or however long the patents last. If we're not lucky, they'll bumble around like cable providers trying to develop "valuable add-ons", and the only reason they'll have any success is because no one is allowed to compete with them. Sorry if that's overly pessimistic, but that's how this article came off to me. I guess patents do have the benefit that we are getting to hear about this development at all instead of it being a tightly-controlled trade secret. And this kind of payoff is what funds the R&D gamble to begin with. I just hope that they actually deliver reusable parts that other people can build into bigger innovations instead of trying to control the innovations themselves.

ohitsdom 12y ago
I don't think it's a patent issue so much as a question of resources. Sure, Google, Apple, Microsoft and others have the resources to develop a similar machine, but a new type of computer would wipe out their business model in a much more devastating manner than HP. HP has the resources, but also isn't enjoying too much success to scare away this risk.
- chatmasta 12y ago
  Or, on the other hand, Google/Apple/MSFT are actually incentivized to research this technology, precisely because it could disrupt their revenue. When new technology 5-10 years down the road threatens your present business model, it makes sense to research it so that you're prepared to adapt when it arrives.
- haberman 12y ago
  You don't think the fact that HP has a bunch of patents around this sort of disincentives others? Also I'm not seeing how radically denser/faster storage is going to make search engine or consumer device business models tank.

marincounty 12y ago

HP need to show up at my door with a check for $599.00 plus tax for a laptop that I used 5 times and died on the day of 366! Nerds remember. I don't think this Podunk company realizes once you lose a customer, you lose them for a long time. The reverse is true; once a male buys a product he likes--you have a customer for life. It's taught in every business school? Men just want the dam thing to work? Oh, and hire a CEO who knows a little bit about engineering? That last sentence goes to all hardware companies.

Eleutheria 12y ago

> could replace a data center’s worth of equipment with a single refrigerator-size machine Ten years later it will fit in your pocket.

chrisweekly 12y ago

Now THIS is "Hacker News". Perhaps a slightly unlikely source (does businessweek usually have this quality?) but v interesting article and discussion here. Sorry not to be adding more substantively to it, just glad it's here. :)

mathattack 12y ago

I am happy to see them emerging as an R&D power. They haven't had much to show for themselves lately, so I wish them well on this.

bayesianhorse 12y ago

The government has a secret system: a machine ...

alyxr 12y ago

What's the long-term reliability/durability of memristors? Do they die after too many reads or writes?

rntz 12y ago

The article mentions that > Fink has assigned one team to develop the open-source Machine OS, which will assume the availability of a high-speed, constant memory store. I have to ask: if this is open-source, where is it? Perhaps my google-fu is weak, but I can't find anything but news articles talking about "The Machine". EDIT: Aha, found mention in some articles that it "will be made" open source. Future tense. That makes more sense.

shmerl 12y ago

> Fink has assigned one team to develop the open-source Machine OS, which will assume the availability of a high-speed, constant memory store. It's great that they decided to make it open from the start.

jayantsethi 12y ago

Can someone please explain how can light be used to transfer data in computers?

PhasmaFelis 12y ago
I assume they're talking about fiber optics, or something similar. An optical fiber "wire" made of silica or plastic carries photons the way copper carries electrons. Most telecom trunks use them these days. The only thing is that I've never heard of fiber optics being used inside a machine, only to connect one machine to another. I imagine the principles are similar, though.

goblin89 12y ago

This computer may take as long as a decade to build, according to the article. Why did HP choose to reveal their hand so early? Isn't it preferable to take everyone (especially competitors) by surprise?

sushirain 12y ago

The biggest difference the memristor brings is to Machine Learning. The memristor is a first step towards a hardware implementation of Hebb's rule - "neurons that fire together wire together". Hebb's rule variants are used in machine learning algorithms to do things like web-search, image/object recognition, etc. (Specifically, Hebb's rule can be used to compute PCA.) It's interesting to note that the brain does not have separate components for memory and computation. Every neuron computes and stores at the same time.

Houshalter 12y ago
I don't think that's correct. Doesn't the hippo campus store memories?

srbryers 12y ago

Professor F(r)ink??