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Friday Sep 28, 2007

A More Efficient Switch = A More Efficient System

Technologies and architectures for the future datacenter interconnect will have significantly higher performance requirements than they do today, mandating an overhaul in the thinking and research being done in this area. Such thinking is underway at Sun Labs. Hans Eberle (photo), distinguished engineer in Sun Labs, joins Hal Stern, vice president of Global Systems Engineering on this edition of Innovating@Sun, to discuss “proximity communication” - a packaging technology for interconnecting chips. The two discuss how proximity communication works, focusing on:

  • The replacement of wires used for chip interconnect with “capacitive coupling,” thereby avoiding the use of a printed circuit board
  • The physical restrictions of standard wire
  • Getting terabytes per second of interconnect bandwidth per square millimeter of chip overlap
  • How a contactless interconnect allows reworking of a multi-chip module
  • Emerging trends such as virtualization and consolidation that require a bandwidth-rich interconnect
  • The increasing criticality of moving data between nodes
  • Why more powerful interconnects are the key factor to homogenizing the datacenter
  • Energy usage impact

    And while all of this is currently in the research phase in Sun Labs, you can find updated information on proximity switching on Sun's research site.

    Links:



    Transcript
    Project Sedna Website
    Hans Eberle Profile

    • Posted at 03:05PM Sep 28, 2007 by Laura Ventura in Sun [permalink] Comments [3]

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