HP's 'The Machine' changes its spots ~ lotfi

HP's dream of creating a computer based on silicon photonics has been put on the back burner as it plans to repurpose the whole design around a more conventional set of technologies.

The Machine, which was announced by HP last year, will be converted back to a "memory-driven architecture" focused on storing large troves of data instead of bringing together exceptionally high levels of processing power.

Why has HP chosen to make this decision? According to Martin Fink, CTO at HP, the problem was the memoristas, which HP wasn't able to produce at a cheap enough price to justify a commercial roll out, reported Extreme Tech.

The result is a machine that will run on a version of Linux instead of the vaunted Linux++ special purpose OS, and will be build on DRAM memory as opposed to the aforementioned memoristas of before.

Big memory still available

What this means is a machine that will still be able to offer up to 320TB of memory that will debut next year and be based on a slightly more plausible type of memory known as phase change memory (PCM).

Silicon photonics is slowly making inroads elsewhere with other firms such as Fujitsu and Intel making strides in bringing it to servers and the data centre respectively.