[Info-vax] The Machine - Dows Jones newswire report

[David Froble]

> Engineers have booted up an early version of the hardware in a lab in Fort
> Collins, Colorado, a test of the design the company says will allow
> programmers to begin working on new software that will be needed to exploit
> the system.

Where have we heard that before, new software for the HW?  Can you say itanic?

It's interesting that HP feels that they need something new to take advantage of 
advances in memory technology.  Or, is it they want to charge more for their 
products?

Just as AMD added 64 bit stuff to x86, when the new memory technology is 
available, you'll see people using it with x86 and such existing technologies.

Now, I'm sure there are jobs for computers where data is read and acted upon. 
But in my world the data is also updated by multiple entities at the same time. 
  That requires some form of locking.  Or something I haven't yet imagined. 
That means that those large number of processors working on the same memory at 
the same time aren't going to be able to go as fast as some would have you believe.

We had that discussion here recently, directly reading and writing memory, not 
moving to and from I/O buffers.  I'm buying the concept.  I think I can also see 
it happening with today's systems.