
HP Destroys a Dream Computer to Save It - luu
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/03/hp-destroys-a-dream-computer-to-save-it/
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alphakappa
>some people are working on the Machine with an eye to putting the technology
into printers. That way, even a simple business printer could contain and
analyze all of a corporation’s documents.

Are businesses really asking for a printer that can analyze their documents,
or is this an application that's being shoehorned into a product that HP just
happens to have?

~~~
Tloewald
It does seem like a rather odd line. A scanner that could do this _might_ be
useful -- a printer doing it would be kind of nutty.

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vidarh
For larger business, probably. For smaller businesses, the printer and scanner
is very often an all in one unit these days, and a NAS is one more device we
have to maintain, and one of the most frequent activities is to scan documents
and save them in a document store, or pick documents and print them. If you
can stuff enough capacity in the printer/scanner to make it the NAS too,
cheaply enough, and add capabilities to e.g. have it print files directly,
then that could be quite useful. A lot of printers already can print directly
from memory cards etc., so why not straight from the file server?

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Someone
In my experience, in larger companies, the printer, the scanner, and the
photocopier are a single unit.

I think that, nowadays, you only need custom printers if you have fairly
extreme printing needs (large or heavy paper, high-quality color, or large
quantities)

And the typical large copier already stores lots of things on disk
([http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.98.html#subj13](http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.98.html#subj13))

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Tloewald
So, it's all going to happen just like they said it would if for "breakthrough
new computer technology" you read "existing computer technology" and for "new
operating system" you read "Linux port".

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fra
this is an unmitigated disaster for HP. What this signals to me is that they
have given up on commercializing memristors any time soon. That's a $500M
write-down (not as bad as autonomy I guess) and the end of their most
promising R&D project.

~~~
norea-armozel
I think they underestimated the time table to bring it to market. It would've
been better to focus on introducing memristors into specialized processing
chips where they could be leveraged immediately.

On the other hand, it's good they've tried for a Moon shot than nothing. Maybe
someone could buy the project from them since I think non-von-Neumann
architectures are the future. It's just they don't have the budget or the
share holders with the patience for it.

~~~
devonkim
HP has had a strong recent history of strongly preferring to launch products
made by other companies originally resulting in lagging pretty far behind and
failing to become a market leader in any higher margin business with actually
realized growth. Internally developed products from R&D got far, far less
backing compared to a salesforce of hundreds to thousands pushing acquisition
products like Fortify and Autonomy or 3PAR and webOS based tablets on the
hardware side.

I'm not sure if you meant to make a pun, but HP literally had a project called
Project Moonshot for a while that was a bet on the rise of microservers. It
was also highly coupled with HP's bet on OpenStack taking mass control over
internal datacenters of the Fortune 500. I, myself, kind of bet fairly hard on
Openstack but after seeing the rather slow progress of adoption for it after
the better part of a decade of its existence in some form, I'm thinking that
people will start pulling out just from lack of progress.

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serve_yay
People bitch about Apple being driven by marketing but I really just read an
entire article where the author credulously used the phrase "the Machine"
throughout.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
When I read the headline I immediately thought of _When HARLIE Was One_ [1]
and of the _Great Machine_ [2] from Babylon 5.

Apparently some people at HP are also Sci-Fi fans.

Edit: BTW I think it was Henry Spencer who, long ago, quipped something like
"it's not a supercomputer unless it costs a billion dollars". Looks like
they're actually budgeting for half of that so with inevitable cost overruns
they might get there.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Harlie_Was_One](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Harlie_Was_One)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Machine)

~~~
uxcn
Is it actually named after the machine on Epsilon 3, or is it just a
coincidence? There's a B-Film called _The Machine_ as well.

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concernedctzn
I remember the first time I read a hype article about the memristor. They
really made it sound like it was coming out in a year or two. Guess I
should've known better.

~~~
badsock
You can buy devices with memristors today:

[http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Panasonic/MN101LR05DXW/?...](http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Panasonic/MN101LR05DXW/?qs=OeBdveGBEcQzg65tbPujiw%3D%3D)

They've been delivered as promised. I read this as HP not getting the
performance they need to surpass SRAM at its own game and also be nonvolatile.
Which, to me, is kind of duh. You have to bring new tech in from the edges -
niche, but important, products that are very ill-served by existing tech. Once
you've got your production ramped up and the kinks worked out, then you take
on at the really central stuff like CPUs.

Of course, it's very easy to say all this from my armchair :)

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codewithcheese
I believe the goal of the new OS was to try and take full advantage of RAM
only computing and its implications that memristors required. Seems like they
have realized that memristors are further away and more costly to R&D than
they can stomach right now so they are hoping to usher in a new RAM only
paradigm via a linux distro to further justify their continued R&D costs.

The whole printer thing is pure politics. To try and tack some justification
for this project onto their profit center.

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frik
A bit a disappointment, I thought memristor would be big in near future.

Oh, and I somehow missed that HP will split itself in two companies: Hewlett-
Packard Enterprise (computer servers and data storage equipment), HP Inc
(personal computers and printers). So they split out the former Compaq
devision and their printer devision, or the other way around.

~~~
CoffeeDregs
Totally agreed. I know that I shouldn't believe announcements about future
technology... But the early announcements from HP were so confident and "no,
it's really going to be here in 18 months" that I bought in... I was rooting
for a big disruptive result... Still am, but with less enthusiasm.

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Dylan16807
>Devices that now rely on cloud computing for much of their functionality,
like smartphones, could become self-contained objects, capable of memory-
intensive things like voice recognition and language translation without
calling on external computers.

As far as I understand it those things do not at all need large amounts of
RAM.

Not to mention how shoving a million DRAM chips into a server has absolutely
no impact on how you would cram more memory into a phone.

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insulanian
And I hoped for a breakthrough in OS research... The Machine is dehyped.

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hackuser
> Devices that now rely on cloud computing for much of their functionality,
> like smartphones, could become self-contained objects, capable of memory-
> intensive things like voice recognition and language translation without
> calling on external computers

That could have a lot of impact on privacy and end-user control, and on
businesses that sell cloud services.

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higherpurpose
I expect Google to be a laggard (at best) in that area because it _wants_ you
to have to connect to its servers, so hopefully others will pick up the slack.

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Sanddancer
Google wants you to be able to search. Being able to have lower latency for
things like text to speech means that you're more apt to do voice searches and
the like. You've got to keep in mind that the high end google phones already
tend to have more RAM than their apple counterparts.

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ghshephard
320 terabytes of memory - impressive.

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bra-ket
I hope they don't put it on a single IO-constrained box

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dasmoth
Why not? If you've got reasonably static 100TB datasets you want to be able to
fire queries at, then -- if the price is right -- a single huge-memory box
could be a great solution.

Need to run more queries than the box can handle? Buy another one.

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rdlecler1
I'm not sure an organization would want the ability of a smartphone to pull
all of the corporate data... Maybe it's a little safer operating behind cloud
services.

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junichiro
Lol right! Can you imagine...

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shkkmo
> Just as important, the company seems to have realized that even great new
> computing technologies have to attract lots of software developers. Since
> these people already have lots of work, they tend to dislike learning new
> systems, even if they are more efficient.

Um... I don't think that description is accurate at all.

