HP took the wraps off "the Machine" this week at Discover. Julie Bort reports on it, with pix, in the Business Insider at http://www.businessinsider.com/hp-shows-off-new-kind-of-computer-2014-6
Martin Fink, head of HP Labs, with Meg Whitman's backing and blessing, revealed a WHOLE LOT MORE than ever before, about what all of this Memristor stuff of Stan Williams, HP's semi-famous Fellow. See the story from 2008 at http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2008/apr-jun/memristor.html
Peter Bright also covered the Discover announcements... see http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/hp-plans-to-launch-memristor-silicon-photonic-computer-within-the-decade/ He did s nice job of positioning some past announcements (e.g. Moonshot and Apollo, covered in this blog a couple years ago), with bits and pieces of current introductions.
The whole 'system' is not due for completion until, say, 2017 at the earliest, or 2020 more likely, but hey, this is indeed good stuff--the kind of stuff HP used to be known for, changing the playing field.
Meg Whitman, for her part, did a great job of noting that if all the Data Centers (read Cisco Systems and Intel servers and Google and eBay and Amazon concentrated collections of 100,000's of 'blades' were counted for their energy consumption, they'd match the 5th largest nation in the world. Egad.
At a time when Cisco blade servers have just 'arrived' to challenge the x86 vendors (Cisco has a surprising 20% of that market in less than 3 years since entry), a revolutionary energy play could indeed have true value for HP's fortunes.
What is it they say? Stay Tuned?
2 comments:
Here’s the Dell riposte:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2363120/dell-executive-says-hps-new-machine-architecture-is-laughable.html
I thought immediately “says the guy who buys cheap parts from China and India and assembles commodity machines with no intellectual property content at all for the masses with” Swainson doesn’t get it… The world is waiting for a revolution and he knows he’s going to be toast when it happens. Kinda like the CEO of Reynolds Tobacco saying that there’s no conclusive evidence that cigarette smoking has a direct causal link to lung cancer.
-- sw
Swainson and Menon are two long-term IBM folk, both with impeccable histories, that now are key to Dell's hopes. I've known John for a long time--he's a database guy basically; and Menon is fundamentally (and only) a RAID technology disc memory architect.
IBM's history vis-a-vs HP disruptions is not a happy saga for the Armonk giant; whether that smugness will serve Dell well remains to be seen. But think about it--what would you say if you had a losing hand?
Post a Comment