Source: http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/655437/9a4...

The basic idea of the hardware is straightforward. Many of the "usual computation units" (i.e. CPUs or systems on chip—SoCs) are connected to a "massive memory pool" using photonics for fast interconnects. That leads to something of an equation, he said: electrons (in CPUs) + photons(for communication) + ions (for memory storage) = computing. Today's computers transfer a lot of data and do so over "tiny little pipes". The Machine, instead, can address all of its "amazingly huge pile of memory" from each of its many compute elements. One of the underlying principles is to stop moving memory around to use it in computations—simply have it all available to any computer that needs it.