It will take a few years but the possibilities for the hobby are encouraging.-------------------------------------Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW - news) today unveiled details about a new method of laying down microchips that researchers say would process information 100 times faster than today's most sophisticated computers, revolutionizing all aspects of the technology industry. "We are talking about the potential death of the circuit board and anything larger than a cell phone," John Gustafson, principal investigator for Sun's high-productivity computing systems program, told NewsFactor. "It looks like we have done to circuit boards what transistors did to vacuum tubes." Better, Faster, Stronger According to a research paper that Sun released Tuesday at the Custom Integrated Circuits Conference in San Jose, California, the new technique -- dubbed "proximity communication" because the chips are laid down side to side in a patchwork -- would eliminate the inevitable slowdown and power loss that occurs when data are transmitted from one microchip to the next in current circuit-board designs. In tests, the proximity chips achieved a data rate of 21.6 billion bits per second, a little less than half of today's best consumer-available microchip. But Gustafson said the new design has the potential to send information 100 times faster than the fastest contemporary computer -- up to 5 trillion bits per second. If it is successfully transplanted into the consumer market, the new microchip technique will be a great boon to computer users, says Yankee Group senior analyst Dana Gardner. "It's not in production yet, but the increase in speed and reducing the bussing issues in circuit boards and chip modules would continue Moore's law on its merry path: more power, more speed, less cost," Gardner told NewsFactor. Goodbye, Mr. Chips The proximity-communications design is a relatively simple way to cut through a Gordian issue that had effectively limited how fast computers could ever become, a problem that some had given up as insolvable. Circuit boards now are designed with chips set into a printed board, connected by gold wires of about 100 microns thickness. The wires on the microchips themselves, however, are merely one micron thick and, because of rapid advancements in microchip technology, carry information far more efficiently than the off-chip wiring -- up to 100 times more efficient. The limit to computers' speed comes because, no matter how quickly a microchip can churn out data, the relatively backward off-chip wiring cannot keep up, creating a bottleneck of information -- imagine a modern eight-lane highway feeding into the meandering downtown streets and alleys of a relatively old city like Boston, for example. Circuit-board technology tries to get around this by relying on attached caches, which many see as an inelegant, stop-gap solution. "If you didn't have that drop-in performance between the processors and the external pins, you'd create a processor that could consume from only memory instead of the cache, which isn't possible in current microprocessors," Gustafson said. Building a Better Mother Board The Sun technique eliminates the bottleneck entirely by simply bypassing the need for a interconnecting wiring completely. Working on a principle called "capacitative coupling," in which electronic components can communicate if they are extremely close to one another, the researchers placed microchips edge-to-edge, effectively allowing several microchips to work as if they were a single large chip. The result is faster and uses less energy than conventional circuit boards. By allowing processors to work to their potential, the Sun technique will resurrect untold possibilities that people had written off because it was assumed computing technology had plateaued, Gustafson said. "If you asked somebody 10 years ago what could we do now, I don't think people could have foreseen us playing MP3 [files] and music on our PCs," he said. "We will be back on track for lines of research we thought had hit their physical limitations. We've been given a reprieve and have a few more years yet. It's not over." There are still problems to be ironed out, however, including the fact that packing the chips closely together means they generate more heat. "There's no sprinkling this on an existing system and saying it's 100 times faster now," Gustafson said. The Sun Also Rises Gardner said the new chip design could potentially turn things around for Sun, which had been lagging in its efforts to reinvent itself as a "systems" company. "It's had a couple of rough years and is losing marketshare, and they've been having trouble adhering to their message of reaffirming the combination of hardware and software," he said. "But if they get people like Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL - news) to build on this platform, and accelerate Moore's Law faster than Power PC or Intel (Nasdaq: INTC - news), then they're going to have a huge advantage in the systems market."

At what cost??? And by the time it is released for general consumption, the OS and applications will become more inefficient and cause the same bottlenecks as we have today.We need to start spending development efforts for efficiency in the software arena. More efficient languages, reduce the overhead of the OS etc.I hope Microsoft makes the next version of FS for the XBOX II which would contain the above hardware...Barry