[Beowulf] Teraflop chip hints at the future

[Mark Hahn]

> Intel is stacking dram dice above the cpu as an L4 cache, but the article

stacking seems like a major hack - I'd rather think about how to do 
processor-in-memory (perhaps zram?).

also, current production dram is around 1Gb/128MB, and the chip's 
already got 400 KB of memory onchip.  it's still really important 
to have a substantial fan-out from cpu to memory for capacity.

> doesn't really
> explain how they plan to expand the off-chip bw other than by going to 
> photonics
> eventually.

isn't photonics still at the hand-waving stage?  I was just noticing how 10G
XFP's have not gotten much cheaper over the past couple years.  is there
really a prospect for wide and fast photonic links, given that copper links
are at ~3 Gb pretty easily?  have people figured out how to mass-produce 
photonic-chipped systems as efficient as copper PC boards and bumped chips?