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Sun Working to Obsolete Motherboards
perl_camel_jockey writes "Sun is developing a new technology that promises to increase computing power by eliminating the need for physical, soldered chip-to-chip connections on the motherboard. Called 'proximity communications', it portends the ability for chips to talk to one another wirelessly just by being next to each other. Potential applications in computer design abound. Apparently this is part of Sun's Hero program, recipient of a $50 million grant from DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems program to rejuvenate supercomputing in the US and regain the lead lost to Japan, in particular to NEC's Earth Simulator, ranked as the most powerful supercomputer in the world."
Actually, since the system uses capacitive coupling, you'd have a much bigger problem with the ionized particles released by the vacuum cleaner. The $200 cabinet should keep your system running quite happily.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
It's about increasing chip-to-chip bandwidth by using capacitative coupling instead of (comparatively huge) physical wires. This means the chips would have to be more closely connected, probably slotting together like lego bricks.
In any case, in conventional devices the pins will also work as (very low-power) transmitters, too. So once you've found a method of decoding this signal mix, you can probably get at the information on conventional chips, too.
Actually, there are already methods available to figure out what the chip does currently. I have heard of one that tries to measure the power usage, at each fetch-execute cycle, and based on that, can figure out what kind of instructions have been run. The CPU already gives out EM radiation which can be detected. It may be just a matter of figuring out what kind of signal is radiated when each instruction is being executed to know what instructions are being run. So the same security concerns already exist today.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those that know binary, and those that don't.
I was just reading an article about their new amd workstations and it had a picture. I wish I could find it now but a quick search didn't turn it up. They have their cpu's on a seperate board, their chipset is also on another board. The two are connected to the main board. Makes it easier and cheaper to keep the workstation up to date. I wouldn't call that outdated.
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