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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?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Heat is solvable with next generation cooling (i.e peltier or cryo...or just a really big freaking fan) but the performance increase will have to validate the extra effort.
The great thing about circuit boards is that they're cheap and easy to replace, so the maintenance gains they're talking about are not as great as they claim. It's also a VERY well understood tech; Sun takes a substantial risk by going in a totally different direction. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Um...who repairs motherboards anymore? At around $100 a pop, most people just get a new one.
If there's a high-end application for this technology, great, but getting rid of high-end hardware is one of the biggest reasons people are also getting rid of Sun...
Most likely, the capacitive coupling of signals is only targeting chip to chip data signals, not the supply of power to the chips.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Dust & dirt. I would imagine that at such low voltage levels, induced current would require a damn near perfect level of alignment between the chip and the "socket". This is admitted in the article. What they don't admit is that it's going to be nearly impossible to get the damn thing in the socket without letting dust or dirt inbetween the chip and the socket.
And a more interesting topic is their consistent mentioning of taking the cache of the chip. That's a nice dream and all, but where the hell are you going to put it then? Hardwired onto the motherboard? That's going to dramatically increase the cost of mobo's (so they are simply shifting who gets to eat the high sticker price on their products). And what if I buy a quad capable mobo, but only put 2 processors on it, I'm effectively wasting 2 sets of cache, rather than simply wasting 2 cpu sockets, and the sockets are a hell of a lot cheaper than the cache. I suppose you could fix this by going back to COAST (cache on a stick, yeah i know you remember that nasty stuff). But that brings in a whole new problem: These days, cache is only fast because it's so close to the cpu. If they move it off the die, it's just going to be put back on in 2 years because we can't access the cache fast enough ever since we moved it off the die.
I'm no super computer engineer, but these guys better have an entire family of rabbits they plan on pulling out of their asses or this fucker's gonna flop.
Wow. It will be even easier to bug a computer, just drop a survailiance device in it, or near it (preferably with a small flashing led on it, to the Mission Impossible soundtrack).
When asked why, the answer is almost always: "It's 2014".
One thing is for sure. If they can get this to work and if heat production can be cut down, this would make computing equipment and electronics much smaller.
That is why this kind of technology is used in embeded systems for years. Stack EEPROM and RAM on eachother in one housing to save space.
implement transmitter/receivers using capacitive inductence
Ha! That's the funniest mis-use of electronics terms I've seen in quite a while.
Yeah I know this is OT/FB but what the hell.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Well.... You can do that. And you can have a lot more than four interconnects per chips. However the "simple optical connections" are anything but simple. Look into (forgive the pun) photonic switching fabrics for more info. Cray Inc. is looking into optically coupled chips for their Cascade project (DARPA supercompute-off). Sun just thinks capacitive coupling is the way to go. As far as the heat goes... it doesn't generate as much heat as real connections, as little or no current is flowing.
Sun is the company I hate to hate. They have some of the brightest people in-house and create some amazing tech and ALWAYS seem to crap the bed on the business side. What good is a beautiful baby boy when it ends up being still-born? Man, I wish IBM just officially turn them into an R&D department.
-_-
Im pretty sure thats nothing like what we need. We have protocols for short range RF communication that dont require careful alignment of the transmitter and receiver. Thats old hat. But to do what sun and other companies are proposing you would require a few dedicated chips for every few connections between individual components. The advantages of requiring alignment is allowing very low power since you dont need a strong signal and not requiring any sort of arbitration. Sort of like whispering a question to your neighbor in a classroom instead of raising your hand, waiting, and asking the professor what the last word of the last slide was.
--Kevin
It is so lucky for Sun that Slashdot exists to bring together ignorant people from all over the world to tell them what their professional engineers have been unable to figure out. I'll bet no one down there had considered the fact that wireless transmission is different than wire-based transition. Hopefully some of their people are reading this, and the R&D department can get right on with dismantling the project.
Seriously, I keep clicking the 'read comments' button hoping to read something interesting. Instead, I see a dozen posts by people who read the headline, think 'well that won't work!', and post about it. If you came up with it in half a second, do you think you're the first person to have that very original thought? Come on.
"They think airplanes will be faster? Ha. They've completely forgotten to take headwinds into account. "
The difference is water cooling can move heat a significant distance. Peltiers cannot. Peltiers move some heat a short distance, and then throw in more heat of their own into that small area. In short, they suck. They have very few practical uses. That's why you don't see them around much.
My interpretation of the article is that it suggests that it could do a bit more than what you discuss. With such technology you could read much larger chunks of data at a time. Rather than being limited to 32/64/128 bit data, you could have a huge data bus. So you are not just reducing the latency, you are also increasing the throughput of the system.
Dean G.
"I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned."-- some guy named George
I must say I'm skeptical about going to serial links for things like memory access. If you go from a 256 bit parallel bus running at 800 MHz to a serial link, your motherboard traces are going to have to carry a signal at something like 200 GHz to get the same bandwidth. Your circuit board is going to need to be a millimeter-wave waveguide, and what are you going to make the transducers shoveling that data over the motherboard out of? You can generate 100 GHz-THz carriers using Gunn diodes, but that's not a signal.
You'd need optical links, and not very long ones. It probably wouldn't reduce the cost of the motherboard, anyway.
I'm guessing the joke in that in terms of EE, capactiance and inductance are kind of opposites of each other. Because:
An indutcotor, is like a heavy train, it takes time to get it moving, but when it is moving it takes time to change it. So it is very good at blocking AC signals (they try to move back and forward at high speed, ie constantly changing) but passing DC.
A capacitor is like a condom, you can fill it, and empty it but you cannot go through it, however it is possible to pass an alternating signal to your partner though it during sex. So they are good at passing AC signals and blocking DC.
God, I hope thats the right way round.