Hp Unveils "the Machine"

With the rise of the Chinese computer manufacturing giant "Lenovo" and increasing competition around the world, HP has been struggling to reinvent themselves. In characteristic fashion, several years ago they went back to the garage and started tinkering again attempting to reinvent the computer. Their two main focuses have been on developing memristor technology and what they call the "The Machine" which is a completely new computer architecture that is designed around memory rather than the processor.

Normally a computer is designed with the processor in mind because a cpu can work at up to 5ghz which is higher than cellphone frequencies. Your average processor is so fast that if you tried to send its data around an ordinary circuit board at those speeds it would all radiate out into space as microwaves rather than reach their destination in memory or the display or whatever. For that reason, computers typically send all the data around to different parts of the computer in large batches at much slower speeds and the processor has its own built-in cache or memory to help it process all the data in batches. The problem is, that introduces added complexity and latencies just to get around the problem that electrons will only move at slower speeds across cheap circuit boards and nobody has come up with a better alternative that is also amazingly cheap.

Size does matter, and HP is counting on the fact that even home computers and cellphones are starting to routinely store ridiculous amounts of data forcing the issue of how to best organize the computer to shuffle around all that data. Intel, AMD, and all the major manufactures are going this same route, but they are focused more on taking incremental steps rather than leap-frogging to the next generation computer architecture. Its a sort of Hail Mary pass for HP and everybody has been waiting to hear something more substantial from their efforts, rather than more theoretical possibilities and visionary dreams, and this announcement is the first to indicate they may be getting ready to take their research to the next stage and even produce a commercial product sometime within the next few years.

Like the rest of the industry, they are attempting to produce a more analog architecture for computers that more closely resembles that of the human brain. In the vast numbers that our neurons organize in, using a scalar architecture is the only viable solution for rapidly and efficiently crunching numbers and is why, for example, the brain resembles an abacus more than an electronic computer because processing data and storing data are actually the same function in our synapses. Doing it that way eliminates latencies and the need to shuffle the data around any further than you have to, which is why HP is attempting to design a computer around memory itself. Combined with IBM's research into memristor technology and asynchronous processors it would mean the first radically new computer architecture since the invention of the vacuum tube, but we'll just have to wait and see if they can actually produce something commercially viable.

Theoretically, the human brain can store over a petabyte of data, or the equivalent of the entire world wide web, and those numbers are just so unimaginably huge it makes HP's little 160tb "Machine" look pathetic by modern standards, but their design is scalar meaning it can be expanded, they claim, up to 4,096 yottabytes, or a trillion terabytes, making the brain's capacity look wimpy. Their first architecture requiring 160tb is an indication that this is the minimum amount of memory their architecture can support. Again, theoretically, roughly 26tb is enough to run a real time ray traced virtual reality program and what you can do with 160tb is something only someone running a modern supercomputer might be able to guess.

 

??? What unveiling? Its still in development

 

Yes, believe it or not, companies actually show off their prototypes.