🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BzAE6A.6qF@cpsc.ucalgary.ca> cleary@cpsc.ucalgary.ca (John Cleary) writes:
>
>So whats wrong with putting one CPU on the chip and filling the rest with
>DRAM? 
>This might also help with the heat dissipation problem which I am told
>is one of the biggest design constraints for the newer chips.
>Why have lots of cool memory chips and hot CPUs, instead have lots of
>luke-warm mixtures :-)
>If you fill the chip with CPUs and then have to go off chip for memory
>surely it is better to have the local memory close to the CPU.
>You wont be able to get speedup unless each parallel CPU has a reasonably small
>working set of memory anyway.
>I have also wondered whether we may be reaching the point where it is better
>to avoid the complexity of Superscalar etc. and just have lots of simple
>CPUs with their own local memory on chip.
>-- 
>John Cleary
>University of Calgary.
>cleary@cpsc.ucalgary.ca

This sure has some BIG advantages (think of cache line filling:
1 (one) row access would be sufficient, with a data path between dram 
and cache of 256 bytes (for example)). But not for today. Don't forget
the ruleofthumb: 1MIPS, 1MB, 1Mb/s. Today's processors need at least 16MB.
I don't think it is possible to fit much more than a few MB on a chip, 
right now. But maybe in a few years, how knows ?

	Stefan