Dell Exec Calls HP's New 'Machine' Architecture 'Laughable' 173
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.
HP should liquidate (Score:2)
Yeah, maybe HP should shut down and give the money back to the shareholders. Right ?
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Did the buy out of Dell happen?
Because if so they kinda followed through with that idea themselves at least.
Mr Dell's just upset (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mr Dell's just upset (Score:5, Informative)
Nor HP.. HP's quality has tanked hard as well. Most of their Mexico Assembled crap fails quickly. 5 desktops quad i7 top of the line HP boxes, 3 of them had problems that required a major repair like mother board replacement.
It seems that all the computer makers are just building low grade dog food these days.
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That's amazing. Raw parts bought at retail seem to be of great and awesome quality nowadays to me. DRAM works, motherboards were slowly perfected, everything gets more efficient, powerful and less noisy. PSU performance is excellent in particular (and no need to spend too much. Vast majority of PC will get by with a 400W or less just fine).
Now on motherboards that's probably where a company like HP will choose one equivalent to what is sold at about 38 euros, whereas a sane customer will choose at least the
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Well, there's a difference between that raw retail part you bought, and an identical mobo in a pre-built PC. A guy I knew did IT at a big paper in... Annapolis, if I recall. Several years ago, they upgraded to shiny new all-in-one PC's all over the newsroom. I don't remember the brand - either HP/Compaq or Gateway, probably. Anyway, a few months in, they start failing, one after another. Turns out a bunch of them had components that had all been in one shipping container in a warehouse - and that conta
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We had a bunch of LG TV's arrive pre filled with cockroaches. It seems that China is also shipping free pets with many electronic products.
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Actually you are off by a bit. HP motherboards are around the 15-20 euro mark. They use the absolute lowest quality parts they can get their hands on.
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And then the crippled BIOS (with any OEM) can be a hindrance. You can't lower the FSB, or lower RAM speed, loosen RAM timings, bump memory voltage by 0.1 volt etc. all of which can help stabilize a semi-failed PC again.
Got lucky with a buddy's Packard Bell mini-PC with "Core 2 Solo" Celeron, all was crippled (BIOS allows to set the date and boot device, that's almost all) but dropping to one stick of DRAM instead of two (no matter which one) saved it.
This is how I know HP is on to something (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Hardly. One company commenting negatively on the R&D project another company is currently trumpeting is a practice so standard you could automate it. This announcement from Dell is about as mind blowing as Tim Cook saying that the iPhone5 is better than the Samsung Galaxy S5. He'd almost be fired for not saying it.
The presence or absence of such statements are not based on reality and have absolutely zero bearing on how much of a success something will be.
The definition of innovation (Score:1)
HP, despite leadership's best efforts throughout the years, still does legitimate innovation. Dell has never done the whole innovation thing.
Dell can have no valid opinion on this. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Why would anyone pay attention to what a Dell talking head has to say?
DUUUude, that's harsh.
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Re:Dell can have no valid opinion on this. (Score:5, Interesting)
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"HP has a long history of OS and CPU design, including their own computers with a proprietary architecture."
and nobody works there anymore that does that, They fired all the high paid specialists years ago.
The HP of today is not even worthy to stand in the shadow of the HP of yesterday.
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They're all dead. It was that long ago.
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Oracle are more innovative than Dell.
Now you're just being mean.
Here's what I don't care about: (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Dell desperately seeks relevance in today's market (Score:1)
Dell is rendered irrelevant nowadays. So they are looking for publicity to stay in the minds of the few who still like to hold on to the crap of yesteryears like my attachment to toshiba libretto mini laptops.
Bad mouthing others is often a good way to get publicity. They will be rendered mute by industry in a few weeks like qcomm's 64bit outcry - necessarily pointing out -"waa waa, he did it while I couldn't".
When did dell get any innovative stuff out ? Their business model in the beginning was probably the
Dell argument is wrong (Score:2)
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.
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Most of the space is typically taken up with disks but that's irrelevant, just like it was in the 1960s, the important thing is what you actually do with the data and not how much you can hoard.
While for some tasks I would really like to see direct connections between CPUs in different cases/racks and vast amounts of shared memory so a cluster can be treated as a single machine in more than an abstract sense I think I'm in the mino
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It is not CPU and Memory being the two main core components of modern computing fabric. Instead, it is the inter-connect and memory,
How far will you get without your CPU? You can't execute one instruction. You can't even POST. The CPU and memory are the two main core components of modern computing fabric.
What is the Dell CEO supposed to say? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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some radically fast system running something that looks like Linux.
If it looked like Linux, it most certainly wouldn't be "radically fast". Or at least "radically faster than Linux on commodity HW". You really have to throw away all your preconceptions - and your existing SW - if you want to really reap the benefits of huge non-volatile random access storage. Why would you design screaming-fast hardware and then cripple it with inadequate software? Especially if it's new and expensive technology.
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Just because something looks like Linux or any *nix does not mean that it can't actually be fundamentally and radically different under the hood.
Linux is a un*xy system. It's all built around the notion of byte streams, also known as files, organized in a hierarchical fashion, optimized for streamed (or at least semi-random, block-sized) access. This new hardware brings the promise of persistent heaps. How exactly do you propose to design an OS for that, keeping the benefits of persistent data objects, while running applications working on serialized data on top of that? That "fundamentally and radically different" thingy underneath the file-emulati
Re:What is the Dell CEO supposed to say? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The beauty of the UNIX operating systems is the simple idea that everything is a file, period. Knocking down the wall between the filesystem which is just a file and memory which is just a file is a matter of semantics and drivers. So you've got an in memory file system, this filesystem instead of inodes has memory offsets. Getting
Re: What is the Dell CEO supposed to say? (Score:3)
Its called mmio, mmap() specifically. Linux already has xip support on some platforms as well. This is all under the hood too, the libc could be redesigned, or insert your favorite language here. I agree that writing code optimized for it might be a bit different but its not that different than writing for an all-sram platform like say the old palm.
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Why write everything from scratch right up from the command line text editors to the convenient graphical user interfaces, when you do not have too?
You probably wouldn't have to ditch everything. I suspect that Smalltalk and (later on) Newspeak programs could actually get ported almost automatically (and VisualWorks is still pretty big in some business circles). (What would you need command line text editors for, though?)
In many cases "can buy and get two times the performance now" will be bought but "can buy then re-write all your software from scratch to get 200 times more performance" wont. Certainly there is a market for the latter but, where depends on the need for performance and the cost of rewriting the program, as well the difference between the cost of the new machine and it's rivals when buying replacements for current kit.
These things would probably propagate top-down. There are areas where people need the absolutely greatest performance. Right now, companies like IBM and Unisys are the only place where you go for the largest transactional systems. The
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Dell is a privately held company. (Score:2)
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.
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"Not publicly traded" does not equate to "do not have stockholders". They wouldn't be required to speak publicly to their shareholders or to file with the SEC, but there are all sorts of businesses which have privately held shares.
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- Swanson is not Dell's CEO
- Dell is under no obligation to comment, they could opt to do what all of HP's other competitors do
- Dell is privately held, it has no shareholders
- modern HP has proven incapable of delivering tech that leads
- other companies already ARE selling NV Ram technologies into storage markets, HP won't be getting royalties on this
- HP doesn't have to sell to Dell, but they have to sell to somebody. They won't establish anything as standard on their own
- Building a business on crappy p
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TI?
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"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."
Aren' patents great. Even if you fail to invent anything that works you can just file a general patent for the technology and claim royalties on a design that someone else actually gets to work, in perpetuity.
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Fucking hell, will it cure cancer too?
I'll believe it when I see it.
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Simple explanation: John Swanson is scared. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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"Obviously the price is that you absolutely have to rewrite the software bottom-up, otherwise all that extra performance potential gets lost."
Which is a GOOD THING (tm). The current state of software quality is horrid, anything to force a rewrite will be a very good thing.
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And while we are at it: We have issues with software reuse, bugs (in general) and testability, security. Software development is in the pre-industri
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> anything to force a rewrite will be a very good thing.
Have you ever tried to debug a major of piece of software that has been re-architected, from the ground up? Most of the performance benefits are lost in relearning the lessons that the original authors solved in their early releases with the original architecture. The specific benefits that were used to justify the re-architecture are usually not only lost, but overwhelmed and buried in the lost performance, downtime, and shear wasted manpower of re
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It is not difficult to make one of these using conventional; silicon.
It is hard as hell to get funding and sell it. If you actu
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Very well, actually. It takes some smarts in the dataflow graph construction, but it does work (we're also not talking about the same type of code, but processing of back-references in the flowgraph - there are actually good functional algorithms that have better amortized costs (see Chris Okasaki's Purely Functional Data Structures for examples).
That being said, the main issue with dataflow was that the dataflow nodes were always proposed at the level of granularity of a Von Neumann instruction set. In fa
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Or an idiot. Or a scared idiot.
A simpler explanation is that he's simply one of the top managers at a competitor. What was he supposed to say, HP are amazing? How long do you think he'd still have his job?
In other news Tim Cook thinks the iPhone is better than anything Samsung have come up with. Surprise!
Memsistor are cool (Score:1)
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Because...?
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Cause now everyone knows what Positrons are, Asimov's positronic brain sounds dated.
Phase Change is the same but faster (Score:3)
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While I would be quite happy for Dell to burn in hell, taking i86 architecture with them, a new computer architecture is a completely different plot from new implementations of memory or a new software design. Memristors are not even content addressible memory - which have been done in silicon, and shown to make text searching and jump tables (ca
I wonder if this applies (Score:4, Insightful)
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First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you.
And most of the time that's where it stops, because the idea was ridiculous.
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I meant that's where the saying should stop in general terms, not necessarily in this particular case
uh no (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.
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It might be just a little more than just a game changer.
Stop thinking about computers as boxes with wires, screens and disks, and start thinking about building the nervous system of a human being. Our bodies use distributed computing all over the place, with the vagus nervous system for the organs, with their own chemical memories, and feedback loops, the localized muscle memory systems for arms, legs, fingers, locally stored programs that run semi-autonomously.
If you read about memristors on Wikipedia, you
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How do you organize your brain? Do you have file cabinets, with tabs, disks? pictures? No, it's some sort of random access sensory system that relates to previously accessed information. Something like the memristors they are talking about.
Memristors are predominantly a way to build things we already know how to build, but more efficiently. No one knows how the brain stores information. It is known that it is possible to create an index to information in your brain by imagining file cabinets, or rooms, or some other sort of containers. I forget things all the time, but my PC doesn't.
I for one... (Score:4, Funny)
Link to animated gif here (Score:1)
Articles should include a link to the relevant video.
I found this gif of the event: http://stream1.gifsoup.com/vie... [gifsoup.com]
You're welcome.
Follow the money. (Score:2)
HP lost their way. Dell never had a way to lose. (Score:3)
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.
Glad to read this (Score:3)
Re:Biggest problem (Score:4, Funny)
Just like all those CMOS chips that once you fuck up a setting their is no way at all clear them..
You can remove the CMOS battery for a while or (Score:3, Informative)
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).
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Old news, circa 2011 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Not those Non Reoccurring Expenses. He's talking about the cocaine and associated business costs with marketing and sales meetings.
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Another way to look at it: the $800 iPhone 5S 64GB contains $210 of parts and cost $8 to assemble [cnet.com], 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?
Re:Old news, circa 2011 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Most of those sunk costs have been paid back a bazillion times over by now.
A good shortcut is to just total up the BOM. All of the development costs for those components will have been amortized into that.
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Maybe we'll see a return to proper programming to go with this new technology, then. I doubt it, but maybe.
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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.
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Maybe we'll see a return to proper programming to go with this new technology, then.
When was this legendary golden age of "proper programming"? I learned to program in the 1970s. Most of the code from that era was horrible FORTRAN spaghetti code. It was garbage compared to most code today, which at least has some structure and encapsulation.
Re:Biggest problem (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
"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 [businessweek.com] from the previous slashdot story [slashdot.org] 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.
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If you read the article [businessweek.com] from the previous slashdot story [slashdot.org] 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"
If you read my other comments here...well, just read my other comments here. 'Nuff said. And yes, I actually do remember core memory.
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I mostly meant that I don't see much difference between the two cases. With any of these two designs, you'll lose a part of a machine's state - for example, if your PSU blows up (*). The only difference I see between a traditional machine and this one is that the separation between transient state and persistent state is physical in a traditional machine - DRAM is transient, disk drives are persistent (and writes onto disk are commits to the persistent state), while this new machine would most likely enforc
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...The only difference I see between a traditional machine and this one is that the separation between transient state and persistent state is physical in a traditional machine - DRAM is transient, disk drives are persistent (and writes onto disk are commits to the persistent state), while this new machine would most likely enforce a logical separation...
The separation is not supposed to be that clean cut, otherwise the obvious solution is something like a dynamically sized swap file for system memory, or a harder physical allocation for contiguity, at which point the difference in operation would be small...
One of the biggest advantages (second to the physical performance improvement) of this concept is supposed to be the absence of unnecessarily duplicating persistent data into system memory, this is also mentioned in the article. This is what makes the l
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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.
Must be why they store porn on them.
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A handful of times maybe in over 20 years, and I keep backups that I rarely need.
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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.
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So how does a PC boot now? When you start it up the memory is full will random contents! How will it execute that?
Oh wait, there is a boot rom mapped in to the address space. Someone thought of that decades ago.
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Just like what happens now, when the software interrupt fires, the PC gets pointed to the ISR.
Unless your system is completely poked and the keyboard driver won't fire the interrupt when you ctrl-alt-del, you call IT help and follow their instructions when they say "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"
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The keyboard driver, that was woken up by hardware interrupts from the usb port.
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(Fair enough.)
Re:OS Lock In (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
1. Not in the least.
2. I've got work to do, which is more important to me than the warm glow of knowing I use a famous operating system.
seriously.