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Sun Unveils Direct chip-to-chip Interconnect
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?"
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
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.