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.
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.
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.
Because light and other electromagnetic phenomena would take longer to travel around it, so it would be a lot slower.
And what do you do when a $50M sugar cube sized processor goes out? Replace it?
hippies in golden gate park already sell something similar to this.
flying carpets for the mind?
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.
Anyone who's done any wirebonding will appreciate that first photo. Makes my wrist hurt just looking at it.