Back in the day it didn’t take much for me to get excited about a new technology. The rapid progressions we saw from the late 90s through to the early 2010s had us all fervently awaiting the next big thing as it seemed nearly anything was within our grasp. The combination of getting older and being disappointed a certain number of times hardened me against this optimism and now I routinely attempt to avoid the hype for anything I don’t feel is a sure bet. Indeed I said much the same about HP’s The Machine last year and it seems my skepticism has paid dividends although I can’t say I feel that great about it.
For the uninitiated HP’s The Machine was going to be the next revolutionary step in computing. Whilst the mockups would be familiar to anyone who’s seen the inside of a standard server those components were going to be anything but, incorporating such wild technologies as memristors and optical interconnects. What put this above many other pie in the sky concepts (of which I include things like D-Wave’s quantum computers as the jury is still out on whether or not they’re providing a quantum speedup) is that it was based on real progress that HP had made in many of those spaces in recent years. Even that wasn’t enough to break through my cynicism however.
And today I found out I was right, god damnit.
The reasons cited were ones I was pretty sure would come to fruition, namely the fact that no one has been able to commercialize memristors at scale in any meaningful way. Since The Machine was supposed to be almost solely based off of that technology it should be no surprise that it’s been canned on the back of that. Now instead of being the moonshot style project that HP announced last year it’s instead going to be some form of technology demonstrator platform, ostensibly to draw software developers across to this new architecture in order to get them to build on it.
Unfortunately this will likely end up being not much more than a giant server with a silly amount of RAM stuffed into it, 320TB to be precise. Whilst this may attract some people to the platform out of curiosity I can’t imagine that anyone would be willing to shell out the requisite cash on the hopes that they’d be able to use a production version of The Machine sometime down the line. It would be like the Sony Cell processor all over again instead of costing you maybe a couple thousand to experiment with it you’d be in the tens of thousands, maybe hundreds, just to get your hands on some experimental architecture. HP might attempt to subsidise that but considering the already downgraded vision I can’t fathom them throwing even more money at it.
HP could very well turn around in 5 or 10 years with a working prototype to make me look stupid and, honestly, if they did I would very much welcome it. Whilst predictions about Moore’s Law ending happen at an inverse rate to them coming true (read: not at all) it doesn’t mean there isn’t a few ceilings we’ve seen on the horizon that will need to be addressed if we want to continue this rapid pace of innovation. HP’s The Machine was one of the few ideas that could’ve pushed us ahead of the curve significantly and its demise is, whilst completely expected, still a heart wrenching outcome.
