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Comment by smhinsey | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know by what metric it will be 1,000 faster? It seems like a technique for having massive numbers of cores in parallel, but I'm not sure how the adhesive would address any specific improvements to the cores themselves.

That said, even if it's just a way to get 1,000-core CPUs or whatever, it sounds like a remarkable breakthrough.

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A lot of wait states in a CPU come from accessing memory outside of cache. If you make all the RAM in your system the same as cache, you'd get a huge leap.

Yeah, that's an obvious one. Not sure how I overlooked that. Thanks.

If RAM clocked higher and pushed closer to a processing cpu would make everything 50 times faster it'd still need 20 times as much silicon. Considering ideal heat dissipation such a system would still need let's say 20x100w = 2kW of input power. Which is about what a fast boiling kettle needs. How much realistic is that?

Where do you get the 20 times as much silicon number? For example, SRAM typically uses 6 transistors per bit, as opposed to 1 transistor for DRAM. What are the other 14 transistors doing?

I'm speculating wildly here, but I suspect a major benefit to going 3D like this will be improved chip layout -- no need to take a lengthy route around all the stuff in the middle just to get from the ALU to the L1 cache (for example), just go straight up.

Of course the article doesn't mention if it's possible to make (and align) vias through this special glue, but I would really hope so.

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