HP Silicon Silliness
July 14, 2014
Now this is quite the claim. Bloomberg Businessweek declares, “With ‘The Machine’ HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer.” At the heart lies something HP Labs has developed and dubbed memristor. This use of the historical term has been a bit controversial, but, whatever the case, they’ve claimed the name now. Writer Ashlee Vance explains:
“At the simplest level, the memristor consists of a grid of wires with a stack of thin layers of materials such as tantalum oxide at each intersection. When a current is applied to the wires, the materials’ resistance is altered, and this state can hold after the current is removed. At that point, the device is essentially remembering 1s or 0s depending on which state it is in, multiplying its storage capacity. HP can build these chips with traditional semiconductor equipment and expects to be able to pack unprecedented amounts of memory—enough to store huge databases of pictures, files, and data—into a computer.”
While more and more memory is always better and better, we’re not sure this counts as a “new kind of computer.” This seems more like the front edge of Moore’s law’s successor to me. Be that as it may, the development does promise to speed processing significantly. The new computers will also need a new OS. Unlike the OS’s we know and love, this Machine OS will assume the availability of the high-speed, constant memory store provided by the new tech. Linux and Android OS versions are also in the works. The write-up goes on to note that memristor fibers could conceivably replace Ethernet cables.
Vance says the engineering community is impressed with this development at HP, and that it has helped with recruitment for the company. According to a representative, we could see the Machine on shelves between 2017 and 2020, but the article points out that HP has missed earlier self-imposed deadlines around this project. We shall see.
Cynthia Murrell, July 14, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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