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A comment on With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer. Parent comment

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by sp332 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:25PM (#7879561)
Filesystem semantics are a bottleneck. Fusion IO had to get rid of them when they demoed their billion-IOPS platform last year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3434711

For communicating data between programs, would you create a filesystem object that points to memory inside your program, or what?

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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by colanderman on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:14PM (#7879868)
That doesn't make any sense. Create a file, memory-map it, bam, you have RAM performance with "filesystem semantics". (There is NO overhead associated with memory-mapping a file on a ramdisk in the Linux kernel.)

Probably what they're referring to is something more along the lines of replacing SCSI or NFS with a protocol that is a better match for the random access patterns used to access in-memory structures. (Hence their 64-byte I/O size; that is equal to a cache line on Intel architectures.)

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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by sp332 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:55PM (#7880399)
Hm, how would this memristor stuff connect to the system? Will it look like a memory controller or more like PCI-e flash?
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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by wmf on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @06:33PM (#7880830)
It sounds like HP is pitching it as memory.
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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by DelwinAmber on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:38PM (#7879636)
Yes. On Linux it's /dev/shm and it is a ramdisk that you can access from multiple processes.

IPC (Inter-Process Communication) is a known technology. This won't change it much if at all.

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