August 5, 2014

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Imagine storing 32 million photos on your phone? Or what about the equivalent of 11 years of home video footage? Surely, that isn’t possible? Well, it might not be possible yet – but could there be a huge jump in memory storage? Could you “store your life” on your phone?

Technology company HP says it is developing technology that it says could lead to a phone with 100 terabytes (TB) of storage – and that is one heck of a lot of storage. Just take a look at the infographic below, which puts it into some context.

The Machine

HP unveiled what it calls The Machine this summer, which has has been described as a future computing IT architecture.

The company says it wants to increase performance by around 5 times but at 80% less energy to avoid “hitting a wall” in terms of space and energy using current technology.

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The Machine is designed to bring together advanced strands of technology around computer processing, connectivity, memory and storage.

HP’s executive vice president and chief technology officer Martin Fink said: “We didn’t want to call it a server, we didn’t want to call it a data centre, we didn’t want to call it a workstation or a notebook, or a laptop or a tablet or a phone because it can actually be all of these things.

“So one answer to the scope question is it actually encompasses all these different types of computing. And you can go from the very small, so imagine a machine in every plane, every car, every air conditioner all the way to massive data centres type of scale.”

HP is also throwing a lot of resources at the project – about two-thirds of what its labs are doing. The company’s business units are also working on The Machine and HP is talking about creating a new operating system which will be an open source project with the company inviting universities to join it as part of that effort.

The future: 100 terabytes storage on your phone?

Mr Fink added: “Imagine your phone with 100 terabytes of storage.

“You can store your entire life on your phone and not have to send it anywhere.

“And it’s all with you.”

He explained The Machine brings together technology around systems on chips, using photonics – light beams – rather than copper cable, wires and connectors and electrons to connect the computer inside and with other computers and rethinking how memory and storage work to “collapse” them into something dubbed “universal memory”.

But while the computer scientists get on with their work and we await The Machine coming to the market, there are some pretty impressive memory cards on sale right now.