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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 colanderman on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:51PM (#7879724)
So imagine the difference in an operating system that could retain its running image between reboots

What do you mean by this? This sounds like hibernation to me.

not have to distinguish things like stack/heap

I'm lost here too. This is a distinction that is made for purposes of program structure, not to kotow to demands of hardware.

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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by valarauca1 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:57PM (#7879757)
It sounds like hibernation but it isn't exactly. Hibernation the ram is off loaded to the HDD and read back into ram on boot.

With this system your ram would be constant. You could pull the plug on your computer any time, and everything would still be there. It would start in the exact same state it was in before the power loss, no data loss, no corruption.

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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by trebor on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:56PM (#7879750)
Okay, imagine that to put your computer into hibernation mode all you need to do is hit the power button. This is instantaneous because none of the data has to be synced to permanent memory, because it's already in permanent, non-volatile memory.

I'm not sure what he means by distinguishing between stack/heap either.

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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by mitchty on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @08:14PM (#7881176)
The stack heap is a bit of a jab at the harvard architecture in general.

I see memristors as being closer to a Von Neumann architecture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture

Even then its not a perfect analogy admittedly. Sorry for the confusion!

I guess a better analogy would be able to be get rid of the idea of "loaded into memory" versus "in ram" versus on permanent storage.

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