Sun's Unwired Motherboard Plans - Page 2

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Why the technology has a lot of promise

Gartner analyst Martin Reynolds also thinks the technology has a lot of promise. "The key to proximity is these connections are short and dense. That takes away a lot of support stuff, so the size of a server can come down. This can make servers significantly smaller and allow for an increase in density in the datacenter," added Martin Reynolds, vice president and fellow with Gartner.

"This is the elimination of all that mechanical stuff that allows for a much higher density of space," he said.

To some degree, computing is advancing in that direction already. Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and AMD (NYSE: AMD) have in recent years switched from pin-based CPUs that have to be carefully socketed in the motherboard to the Land Grid Array (LGA), where metal contacts on the bottom of the CPU simply connect against metal on the motherboard. There is no need for longer pins, which can easily get bent.

Proximity Communications is the next step, where the metal is close but does not need to touch.

Sun is taking other steps to address the shortcomings raised over multi-core supercomputing. Andersson thinks the main problem is not multiple cores, slow cores or the lag between CPU and memory as much as it is that old ways of doing calculations are still being used.

Thirty year-old algorithms

"If you look at the core problem, it really is on the software side," he said. "There are many ways you improve different algorithms to solve the problems. To really take advantage of the performance you can get out of a multi-core system, you need to change the algorithms. Some might be 30 years old."

To address this, Sun is coming up with tools to help customers parallelize their apps, including a new high level language being developed with DARPA that allows a developer to write their app without having to do any of the parallelism, and when the application is compiled, it is automatically parallelized.

One of the main points of the IEEE Spectrum article was that in some cases, multiple cores aren't the answer. The application needs faster cores, not more of them. The semiconductor industry hit the clock speed wall several years ago and shifted to multiple cores as a way of getting more performance.

Andersson doesn't see the gigahertz race coming back, even with recent advances in CPU technology.

"To some degrees, we are still guided by the laws of physics," he said. "It would be real hard to go beyond certain speeds and create problems with power and cooling and other things when you get up to those levels of speed. From a physics standpoint, it's much harder to push much further than where we are today."