[Eug-lug] Re: Concurrency

[walter fry]

At last something I can understand,,In the late 1960's I heard a comment 
that the next great breakthrough would be three dimensional chip 
architecture, at that time it was thought that heat dissipation would become 
the biggest hurdle

>What causes most of the slowdown in going from CPU to main memory is
>the pads and PC board.  On chip signals have orders of magnitude less
>capacitance and so can go at least an order of magnitude faster.
>
>One technology that is being considered is optical interconnect.  That
>would provide a tremendous speedup to this pathway.  The technology
>isn't ready yet.  I don't know how long it will take to appear.
>
>But once you have optical interconnect, it can be used on chip as
>well as off chip.  Recall that Herb indicated the speed limit of
>current processors is basically caused by interconnect.  Optical
>interconnect changes that and greatly reduces the speed cost of long
>distance signaling

Perhaps vertical integration is waiting for optical interconnects, which 
would probably be GaAs due to higher speed than Si as well as higher 
efficiencies
   WF

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