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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.'"
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.
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.
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
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.