Conference papers examined two primary issues: the increased need for on-chip bandwidth between processors and memory instances, and the need for bandwidth between the chip and external DRAM, the latter on the assumption that memory hierarchies may come and go, but DRAM will be with us forever. The papers all emphasized the same overriding issue: power. Projections say that we will run out of power to drive the interconnect, and capacity to cool it, before we run out of physical area for laying out more wires.
Heard at Hot Interconnects: Multicore SoCs May Require Optical Interconnect
August 27, 2008