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Sun Unveils Direct chip-to-chip Interconnect

Posted by Hemos on from the faster-then-a-speeding-bus dept.

mfago writes "On Tuesday September 23, Sun researchers R. Drost, R. Hopkins and I. Sutherland will present the paper "Proximity Communication" at the CICC conference in San Jose. According to an article published in the NYTimes, this breakthrough may eventually allow chips arranged in a checkerboard pattern to communicate directly with each other at over a Terabit per second using arrays of capacitively coupled transmitters and recievers located on the chip edges. Perhaps the beginning of a solution to the lag between memory and interconnect speed versus cpu frequency?"

6 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. Timing? by afidel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder if this release might have been pressed forward a bit to squelch some of the talk about Sun losing their will to innovate after Bill Joy left.

    --
    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  2. Replacing Network-on-Chip/System-on-Chip by KarmaPolice · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This could prove very interesting as the speed usually drops when "leaving the chip" to do communications. There has been alot of research to develop protocols to ease on-chip communication when several ICs are combined on a single chip. If Suns technology can stand the test, NoC/SoC products could reduce it's time-to-marked dramatically...smaller and faster devices for everyone!

    BTW: I didn't RTFA since it requires (free) reg.

  3. Fast today Slow Tomorrow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That is the nature of the beast.

    Remember how excited you were to get your hands
    on a 386 machine?

    The thrill of your first encounter with a 286 screamer?

    Upgrading to 16k from 4k on your TRS-80?

    Your first disk drive for your Apple 2?

    It's all relative.

    So enjoy

  4. Perhaps a physical base for Neural Network? by BlankStare · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder if this hardware computing model could provide the first real base for Neural Network computing? As far as I know, any neural network is currently emulated on linear processing machines.

  5. FINALLY! by JoeLinux · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Someone gets it. As an Electrical Engineer-in-training, I was always frustrated with people who got these big bad processors and wondered why their improvement was minimal.

    They never quite grasped that the biggest bottleneck is between the processor and memory.

    My EE instructor always said that they could improve performance by doing one simple thing: make the interconnects on the motherboard between the motherboard and RAM rounded instead of cornered. You could then increase bus speed as you wouldn't have magnetic loss at the corners like you do now.

    You fix that, and you can see a SUBSTANTIAL improvement in performance. The only thing that can be done beyond that is to get a Platypus drive (Solid state "Hard Drive" made from Quikdata made from DDR RAM). Then you reduce your access time to your hard drive from milliseconds to nano/microseconds.

  6. Sun may be ahead in other areas, too by Mr.+Ophidian+Jones · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Normally I don't pimp Sun, but here's something that makes me think they still have a finger on the pulse of things:
    Read about plans for Sun's "Niagra" core

    I understand they hope to create blade systems using high densities of these multiscalar cores for incredible throughput.

    There's your parallel/grid computing. ;-)