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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.'"
With so many chips so close together, they are certainly going to have heat problems.
Interesting technology, thought.
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...
What they need, instead is VioletTooth (wireless chip-to-chip communcations). That way, they won't have to worry about alignment problems and such!
Did you even read the article before posting it here. The article talked about eliminating the pin that is used to house the chip. Due to the size of the pins, it limits the number of I/O paths a chip can expose to the motherboard. Instead they can implement transmitter/receivers using capacitive inductence to increase the I/O paths a chip can expose. Thereby increasing the bandwith a chip can utilize.
I figured Sun would have laid off their entire R&D department by now :)
Love,
Zaq
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...
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. The printed circuit board is one of the big things holding us back from much better electronics miniaturization.
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.
Wow, this announcement reminds me of an awesome book I just read: http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/mopiidx.ht ml
Think of it as lots of itty bitty low power radio transmitters and receivers.
Sounds clever to me. Electrical engineers have been constantly fighting unwanted interference in their circuits. Now they will be listening for it.
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
And in other news, scientists are developing a computer with no electronic parts at all!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.
This was posted back in September of last year :
m l?tid=102&tid=137&tid=187
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/09/22/1055244.sht
jdb2
so basically they want to stack the chips? umm, heat?
It has to be said, I think that if Sun are seriously thinking of producing such chips then it must be a moderately good idea (they're not monkeys after all), so I wouldn't write it off on the basis of heat concerns.
You've probably noticed that people's noses get bigger as they get older. That's because old people are huge liars.
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".
Well, this is offtopic, but there's no place to discuss the problems Slashdot has been experiencing, so why not here? If the admins won't provide an appropriate forum, we have no other choice.
Does anyone have any idea what's going on here? I can't be the only one who wishes for a front-page story explaining why Slashdot is so amazingly unreliable and broken lately--especially for subscribers who are paying $ for this service.
The article mentions "capacitive coupling". Here is the relevant WikiPedia entry, and here's a paper on the specifics at Sun.
Let's see, in 2 weeks the've anounced that they were looking a buying Novell and getting rid of circuit boards. I guess a positronic brain will be next.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
This side up.
Shouldn't be a problem.. Have you seen the latency on modern Cache implementations? We're already at a BEST case of 2 clock delays with minimal concurrency. We're seeing 8 and even 16 clock cycle delays for L2 / L3 caches. Cache has always been hierarchical.. The lowest latency is always very small.. What this technology provides is effectively extraction of L2 cache with the complete transparenc y of adding L3 cache.. Think 128Meg L3 cache 8Meg L2 cache; something completely impractical for regular general CPU design.. Since you can "upgrade" your cache by replacing a peer-chip, now you can pay-as-you-go.. Spend a thousand dollars a year, upgrading one cache chip at a time.. And we've seen what's happened with the SDRAM market once commodetized. Pretty soon SDRAM may dissapear completely, being replaced by (albeit high power) gigabyte SRAM L4 modules.
If cost effective, and if they can get past the alignment issues, this is spectacular.
-Michael
I work in a Faraday Cage, you insensitive cl... err... you insightful... uh...
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.
-_-
As for the technique of capacitive coupling, that is how signals used to pass through low voltage amps virtually since the triode tube. The technique has been used for isolation amplifiers for many years. The signal on one side of the voltage barrier is digitised in some way (perhaps just PCM) and transmitted across a voltage barrier using very small capacitors, to where it is decoded. In some cases, power for the input side is also transmitted by capacitive coupling across the barrier.
Because the transmitting and receiving side of the capacitors is so tiny and the electric field therefore so constrained, it is not going to be possible to read the signals with an external aerial.
I believe Philips, among others, earlier suggested using LEDs and photodiodes along the edges of packages, but appart from requiring power they could only be unidirectional. Capacitive coupling itself absorbs begligible power and can be fully bidirectional.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
The problem with capacitive connections is that you are, for all intents and purposes, using small radio links. This causes several issues to come to the fore:
- Your immunity to cross-talk goes down. Misalignment will exacerbate these problems.
- Capacitive receivers will also be able to pick up local RF fields. The computer will be much more vulnerable to external interference than it was before.
- The computer will also radiate much more than it did before, creating more RFI and leaking information that might be crucial (like crypto keys).
Making the chips the meat in a sandwich with metal sheets for the bread would help this a lot, because tightly coupled ground planes attenuate both radiation and reception. As long as you're putting a ground plane on top of the assembly it might as well do double duty as a cooling device, though I wonder what effect the heat-transfer compounds would have on transmission and crosstalk.Sustainability and energy independence essay
Just to clearify to the un-initiated. It is the exact same technique that allows CMOS transistors to work (the basis of most CPU transistors).
CMOS-FET = Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor - Field Effect Transistor
That's semiconductors separated by oxide (oxidized silicone or glass) to allow fields derived from differing voltages on either side of the glass to affect conductivity and thereby provide actuatable signals. All this new system does is replace the Oxide with something else; namely the walls of the outside of the chip and the unavoidable air-gap.
Obviously this alternate medium is not as efficient as normal hyper-thin glass, BUT it's more efficient than transferring physical electrons from silicon to copper and amplifying it such that you can induce a measurable current down the coppy wire several centimeters away. More-over, it's more practical to etch micro-wire paths on the edge of a chip than to manually pin-punch chips like we do today. We can make such signal points smaller and more articulate.
The ONLY problem (as outlined in the article) is keeping these micro-signals aligned.. If you're off by even half a capacitive cell, then you're fields aren't going to be strong enough, and depending on cell-spacing, you're likely to generate noise to adjacent cells.
-Michael
so basically they want to stack the chips? umm, heat?
Re-read article. It's not a stack. They make reference to scrabble tiles as a comparison.
Even if it were a stack liquid cooling built directly into the stack, ala the internal combustion engine, could handle the heat effectively. Probably more effectively then our current heat sink technology.
TW
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. "
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
http://research.sun.com/async/Publications/KPDisc
jdb2
This is a very cool idea and it's the kind of thing I expect from Sun. Once it's stated, the solution almost looks obvious. While there's lots of work needed to make the idea practical, I admire the way they took a big noise problem and used it to propagate signal. It's too bad they are run by someone who thinks that they are going to make their money by licensing software instead of selling chips and licenses to very cool and real inventions.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I wonder if this could lead to new treatments of spinal injuries? Say you could place a chip intervening between a severed spinal cord. Instead of having to physically attach all those millions of nerve endings, you could have the chip do it by proximity, and carry the signals on past the gap.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
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.
However, it's probably not a place to discuss it unless you have something to contribute to resolving it.
The next 503 error will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Sun service engineer: I'm trying to fix this CPU, but all I have is sky pieces, anyone have a piece with a little bit of a boat?
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.
They have 5-6 years to work on this whole idea. Every once in a while, people have to go into completely different directions. The engineers at sun are not idiots. Do the people on here actually believe that they're not going to deal with these types of problems that are mentioned here?
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