Back in the beginning days of this semester, we talked about a storage technology developed by Hewlett-Packard known as the Memristor, which is capable of storing massive amounts of data in small spaces, and in state. In other words, it doesn’t rely on the binary construct of 1 or 0, but rather the ability to store data as any value between 1 and 0.

Recently, HP announced an ambitious new project they have dubbed The Machine, which is meant to improve system architecture by using its Moonshot servers as well as fiber to connect the CPU directly to storage without the physical proximity constraints copper requires, vastly increase memory performance by using memristors (which is still considered a misspelled word by editors) to flatten the memory hierarchy we learned about, and top it all off with an operating system based on Linux that HP has cleverly dubbed Linux++. On a side note, ‘++’ in programing is how you increment a value, and it comes up in naming conventions a lot; for example, the notepad I use over the built-in Windows notepad has the name of Notepad++, and coincidentally if you do any programming, it’s a necessity.

The memory hierarchy