HPE shows off The Machine prototype without memristors

From InfoWorld: In 2004, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise's Kirk Bresniker set out to make radical changes to computer architecture with The Machine and drew out the first concept design on a whiteboard.

At the time Bresniker, now chief architect at HP Labs, wanted to build a system that could drive computing into the future. The goal was to build a computer that used cutting-edge technologies like memristors and photonics.

It's been an arduous journey, but HPE on Tuesday finally showed a prototype of The Machine at a lab in Fort Collins, Colorado.

It's not close to what the company envisioned with The Machine when it was first announced in 2014, but it follows the same principle of pushing computing into memory subsystems. The system breaks the limitations tied to conventional PC and server architecture in which memory is a bottleneck.

The standout feature in the mega server is the 160TB of memory capacity. No single server today can boast that memory capacity. It has more than three times the memory capacity of HPE's Superdome X.

The Machine runs 1,280 Cavium ARM CPU cores. The memory and 40 32-core ARM chips -- broken up into four Apollo 6000 enclosures -- are linked via a super fast fabric interconnect. The interconnect is like a data superhighway on which multiple co-processors can be plugged in.

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