They don’t call it HP Enterprise for nothing. Some of the new technology hitting the screen in Star Trek Beyond is coming from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and they couldn’t be more excited about it.
The company announced the partnership yesterday, and while they’re big on hype and small on specifics, they did give us this jazzy commercial starring Starfleet cadets to help explain things:
They’re all about their new innovation, The Machine, which was actually announced back in 2014 and hasn’t gotten any clearer, or closer, in the past two years. But while The Machine — which HPE says will “change everything” — has yet to come to fruition, the company did contribute its Machine-related expertise to the new movie. HPE worked with the Beyond team to create three technological concepts for the film: the quarantine, the diagnostic wrap, and the book. And that’s all they’re telling us. The first two seem ripe for story speculation — Who needs to be quarantined? Who gets sick? — but “the book” is pretty cryptic. (Sign me up for the diagnostic wrap, though!)
HPE’s press release says they spent months working with Paramount, a collaboration of creative minds as well as engineers, researchers, industrial designers, and UX specialists, to come up with the “conceptual technologies” in the film. They were all based on, again, The Machine. They go on to say, “The Machine is poised to leave behind sixty years of technological compromises and inefficiencies, reinventing the fundamental architecture on which all computing is currently based – from smart phones to data centers to super computers. It aims to enable a leap in performance and efficiency, while lowering costs and improving security.”
Should I admit that the hype reminds me of a certain propulsion expert named Kosinski, who needed a buddy from Tau Alpha C to make the magic happen?
For those troubled by the commercial aspects, don’t be. This isn’t the first time Star Trek has partnered up with a company, although usually it’s about getting Trek into the companies’ ads vs. getting products into Trek. Not every campaign can be as cool as 2013’s Leonard Nimoy/Zachary Quinto Audi commercial, but this 2014 Super Bowl spot for XFinity is a gem:
Star Trek: Into Darkness brought this not-so-cleverly edited oddity from Japan, for what looks like a WD-40 equivalent:
And I still love this beauty from 1998, despite the dizzyingly frequent cuts.
But this British power ad recruited the Canadian cast members to take it home for the weirdest of all:
I must be getting old. . . I forgot what all those people in the phone ad looked like without gray hair! :)
I miss some of those guys in the MCI ad. :-(
For the computer nerds among us: The Machine is a new kind of computer architecture that puts a shared single pool of memory at the center, rather than a CPU; and that uses high-speed photonic connections to overcome bandwidth issues. Future versions may make use of a new kind of electronic component, the memristor (a portmanteau of memory-resistor), a device first theorized in 1971 and now on the verge of entering production. A memristor cell can store data like flash memory, but it can also behave like a switch – combining memory and processing in the same unit.
As opposed to low-speed photonic connections. Kids, never buy your photons without checking the expiration date. The old, slow ones suck.
OK, snark over. Thanks, Fred. That sounds really promising!
CmdrR,
Any “connection” that doesn’t use a vacuum would, by definition, be a “low-speed” photonic connection. The point being: the speed of light varies through various materials much as the speed of sound does; so yes, photons travel faster through certain connections than in others.
So my unsolicited advice to you is:
Park your snark, and mark your lark’s arc parquet before you bark it.
Here’s an article about a year old… Obviously the situation has evolved in the past year, but still interesting.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/03/hp-destroys-a-dream-computer-to-save-it/?_r=0
Uh oh. Skynet?
HP seems to be in a downward spiral — I’ll believe the hype when they ship it.
These ads are all canon, aren’t they? “If it’s on film or TV, it’s canon (except for TAS)” is the rule, I believe ;-)
“The Machine puts the data first. Instead of processors, we put memory at the core of what we call “Memory-Driven Computing”. Memory-Driven Computing collapses the memory and storage into one vast pool of memory called universal memory. To connect the memory and processing power, we’re using advanced photonic fabric. Using light instead of electricity is key to rapidly accessing any part of the massive memory pool while using much less energy.”
Just google it, plenty of info out there, on the HP site and other sites saying the project was dead or put on hold back in 2015. Looks like its still going. Sounds interesting.
http://www.labs.hpe.com
http://www.labs.hpe.com/research/themachine/
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-machine-repurposes-design-around-conventional-technologies
http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/05/hp-the-machine-no-memristors/
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/inside-the-machine-hewlett-packard-labs-mission-to-remake-computing/
Don’t forget this E-surance commercial!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n_jyBziPZw
Something is wrong with the lead pic. The green frame should be behind the neck and in front of the nacelle struts, not the other way round. Unless they were going for somekind of optical illusion, which I doubt.
Welcome my son, welcome to the machine.
Where have you been?
It’s alright we know where you’ve been.
The HP video really warms me up to the idea of a Starfleet Academy tv series or web series. Pessimists would call it Trek 90210, but if done right, it could open the door to some great stories with a few of the younger actors crossing over to whatever the next series or movie would be.
I also LOOOOVE the new transporter effect. Much more of a modern take on the original TOS effect, than the swirls of light seen in the 09 film and Into Darkness.
Is there anywhere I can find that picture of the Enterprise sans the green box?
So there will be printers on the Enterprise in “Beyond”? Remember that paper printouts would be a nice nod to TOS’s pilot episodes.
What video? The link leads to a message saying that the video has been removed by user. Has The Machine broken down?
Many discoveries in computer were not realized by those who found the technology. Namely Xerox, some IBM and such…generally the lacked the capacity to produce a commercial product and translate a theory into something that will appeal to everyone. If it is about computers, printers or servers, I believe HP can do it. If it’s about tablets and phones, they won’t have the expertise and the marketing distribution for it. The technology is intriguing, I really hope that the basic circuitry does evolve soon. We are stuck with copper, a metal how is beginning to be hard to get.
We are stuck with copper, a metal that is beginning to be hard to get.