Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!aioe.org!news.swapon.de!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Gregory Ewing Newsgroups: comp.lang.python Subject: Re: Off-Topic: The Machine Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 19:31:20 +1200 Lines: 31 Message-ID: References: <53a8d31f$0$29988$c3e8da3$5496439d@news.astraweb.com> <53aa6381$0$11121$c3e8da3@news.astraweb.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net rCXc8tizdv9R/lhoRHDxPghpOFuurw+PQ/EFPo7lMnD9uOY9vN Cancel-Lock: sha1:DCLnuDA9aiXYiFKeggpbIhQr138= User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.5 (Macintosh/20050711) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en In-Reply-To: <53aa6381$0$11121$c3e8da3@news.astraweb.com> Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:73565 Steven D'Aprano wrote: > Heh, yes, it's a puff-piece, based on HP's publicity, not an in-depth > review. Considering that The Machine isn't publicly available yet, that's > hardly surprising. There's a talk here that goes into a bit more detail, although still not much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzbMSR9vA-c The basic ideas seem to be: 1) An extremely large number of CPU cores, many of them specialised for particular tasks. 2) A single form of high speed, non-volatile memory, of very large capacity, replacing cache, RAM, disk, flash, etc. 3) A high-speed optical connection between the CPUs and the memory. They claim to be able to retrieve any desired byte out of a petabyte of storage in 250ns. That's nice, but the question that comes to my mind is: What happens when a zillion cores are all competing for high-speed access to that memory? -- Greg