Sun Working to Obsolete Motherboards 228
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."
DUPE (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd think that since they ask subscribers to email them if there's any problem with the story, they'd pay attention when we email them...
*sigh*
Deja vu (Score:0, Insightful)
Pride (Score:5, Insightful)
About obsolete motherboards I have my doubts though. The Von Neumann (may be spelled wrong) model has been around for a long time because it has proven to work and it also supplies a lot of companies with revenue. If you only have a single chip, then a lot of companies are going to lose money and they won't like that. In fact there may be a silver lining in this that it will push motherboard manufacturers even further for fear of being wiped out by this type of technology.
Heat? Naw. Here's some better problems. (Score:3, Insightful)
dupes as an important thing? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Worried... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think they are trying to make a small computer with bluetooth or wifi glueing components together. Cables have more bandwidth than wireless.
The security riskes for these "wireless" connections would be no more than that of a normal capacitor of the same size.
Re:Am I missing something? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can transmit power as well as signals without wire. Really, all a singal is, is waveform-modified electromagnetic radiation. Radio transmission towers have their outputs measured in Watts, computers have their power consumption measured in, you guessed it, watts. Whether it's induction or using RF technology to energize the chips, it's entirely feasible *and* possible.
I'm all for doing away with the motherboard and the wires all together anyhow. And jumpers too, I hate those little bastards.
Re:DUPE (Score:3, Insightful)
Go to the search page and try and find something, it totally and absolutely sucks.
Google searches slashdot better than slashdot searches itself. Try it.
How are you supposed to stop dupes when you can't even search your own database?
More to the point, you subscribers aren't paying for much. The only thing they do is give articles the nod, and they still can't get it right. Let alone make their pages compliant, stop the 503 and 500 errors, make the search work or ANYTHING else.
Slack, if you ask me.