

Supercomputers 'will fit in a sugar cube', IBM says - rdamico
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11734909

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codedivine
Well as soon as they shrink the current ones to a cube, someone will come up
with the idea of strapping a thousand of them together on a network. And the
cycle continues.

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sp332
Maybe they're talking about price. I mean, a lot of today's supercomputers are
just made of as many commodity processors and somewhat-specialized
interconnects as fit in the budget. But in the future, you can have
$50,000,000 worth of computing equipment in a 1" cube.

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3pt14159
But why would you need to? What is the advantage? I would rather spend
49,000,000 on one the size of 4 cubes unless you need... I dunno... Hyper-
intelligent AI flying around in bumblebee sized robots.

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sp332
Because light and other electromagnetic phenomena would take longer to travel
around it, so it would be a _lot_ slower.

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citizenkeys
hippies in golden gate park already sell something similar to this.

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gcheong
flying carpets for the mind?

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btilly
Reading this I have to wonder why they are using water for cooling. Rather
than figuring out how to protect the electronics from the liquid, can't they
find a liquid that the electronics is not harmed by?

If they want speed as well as efficiency, liquid nitrogen comes to mind.

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wgrover
Anyone who's done any wirebonding will appreciate that first photo. Makes my
wrist hurt just looking at it.

