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Sun Working to Eliminate Circuit Boards
lokedhs writes "Sun Microsystems is coming out with new chips without connectors. According to the article, this will have a lot of advantages: 'Performance, for instance, could greatly escalate because the speed of transferring data among chips and the number of channels for the transfers would increase. Energy consumption could also decline. Just as important, overall costs could fall, because defective chips could be removed like Scrabble tiles.' This technology will also lead to new CPU's without cache: 'The technique could also allow designers to remove the cache--the large pool of memory currently found on the processor--and put it on a separate chip. Caches were integrated onto processors to amplify bandwidth. Adding cache, however, bumps up manufacturing costs, as it greatly increases the number of transistors. With the bandwidth constraint gone, caches could once again be made independent without it having an impact on performance.'"
so basically they want to stack the chips? umm, heat?
They should get together with Pringles or Lays -- they've both been doing this for a while...
Just as important, overall costs could fall, because defective chips could be removed like Scrabble tiles.
With my luck I'll get a dead Pentium Z or Q that I just can't get rid of.
The angel in the oatmeal.
Since you can "upgrade" your cache by replacing a peer-chip, now you can pay-as-you-go.
Wow, were back to my old 386 PC!
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
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