In Part I we took a look at how Hewlett-Packard plans to revolutionize the world of computing with the The Machine, an ambitious endeavor by the technology giant that hopes to create a system that is six times more powerful than existing servers while consuming 80 times less energy. More than simply a lofty goal, HP has laid out a six-year timeline to help ensure that they can make the dream of The Machine a reality. But will they be able to pull it off?

The biggest obstacle standing in the way of this new technology is just that – the creation of new technology. The success of The Machine will be determined primarily by the success of its four main components – photonics, memristors, system on a chip (SOC), and operating system – all fields of research that themselves are not quite perfected yet. Analyst Richard Fichera has an insider’s take on HP’s latest venture, having served as director of BladeSystem strategy at Hewlett-Packard from 2006-2010. He took an in-depth look at what needs to happen in each of these respective fields in order for The Machine to be a success and provided some insight this week on the biggest hurdles that it will face along the way.

First of all, while memristors are not an entirely new concept in the research-and-development world, they are currently nowhere near being commercialized and have yet to really set themselves apart from other similar technologies. Meanwhile the success of photonics, one of the biggest selling points of The Machine, will not even lie entirely in the hands of HP. Extensive research and a handful of impressive patents in their portfolio surely look good for the future of photonics, yet the implementation itself will likely fall to an outside company. Currently Intel serves as the volume semiconductor supplier du jour, but until they start producing parts that have photonic inter-connects, the jury is still out on whether photonics implementation will be as successful as HP is imagining it to be. The success of the SOC is not entirely in HP’s hands either; granted, they are one of the world’s largest purchasers of processors, which gives them some pull, but it’s not a task they’ll be able to achieve all on their own. Companies like Intel and AMD will be integral to the success of SOC processors and parts.

As for the operating system, Fichera pointed out this week that “HP doesn’t write OS’s. They write cloud environment software right now, and they’re enhancing their own and they’re enhancing OpenStack. Just saying we need a new OS isn’t going to make one magically appear”. The bottom line – HP is going to need a lot of outside help to make this dream Machine a reality. And to keep the timeline on track, they’re going to need not just help, but luck and a lot of hard work. It’s not all doom and gloom though. Just consider the advancements in computer technology that will be achieved in the research and development process alone; even if The Machine doesn’t come to fruition in exactly the way that HP is imagining it, the doors it could open for innovative advancement are endless.

Fichera summed it up best this week, stating that “HP’s in a very good position to deliver systems that utilize this kind of architectural thought. [But] there’s no way anyone can deliver everything they’ve got here in a working system in six years. That’s asking a lot. But the net fallout will be we will get much better systems as more and more people look at these kinds of contributing technologies. If we change HP’s recipe to ‘system on chip, a better persistent memory layer, better inter-connection and data transmission, and improvements in operating system and software environment’ those four things are kind of defining what we need to do to solve this problem.”