On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 11:06:12PM -0800, Greg Lindahl wrote: > Yes, but there are several companies about to produce lower-cost > optical and active copper cables for IB. Since "4 wire" ethernet is > pretty similar to IB, presumably they'll see a price drop, too.
Inter-die and inter-wafer level optical interconnects need not to be standartized, but just link up (over short distances, using fab-side connected high-precision tiny waveguide geometries) the on-silicon mesh fabric, running its custom protocol. What would be interesting in how this thing would deal with routing around defective dies wafer-scale, either by remapping, or realtime with the mesh signalling protocol. > We were showing several of these technologies working at SC last > November. > > Also note that 4 gig FC is the same data rate as DDR IB. > > Now what the final costs will be, who knows? The problem with this chip (I've been expecting something very like this in about 1996, and in fact designed a paper CPU which is very much like this, only much wider, stack-based and leaner-core) is that's pure vaporware. It would also need radically stripped-down kernels, which basically rules out Linux (but there are reasonably lean things like L4 & Co available, which could run Linux as a wrapper on some fatter nodes). -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
