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.'"

Comments

Re:10-pt tiles?

[cuzality]

With my luck I'll get a dead Pentium Z or Q that I just can't get rid of ...

All I got is two 'M's and an 'X'...

Re:yes, water cooling is just transfer

[networkBoy]

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.

yeah, what he said. I was not clear enough in my inital argument against peltiers, this clarifies that nicely. Another solution may be heat pipes as they have several qualities that are positive in this environment (no open water for one).
-nB