Re:After 50 years of effort, researchers made silicon emit l...
by jdsully on Saturday April 11, 2020 @03:12PM
(#22843479)
True it won't affect latency. Yet caches are pretty good at ensuring most DRAM requests take advantage of the hardware parallelization available.
That’s why despite DRAM having pretty much constant latency for the last 20 years bus speeds and bank counts have been consistently increasing. Optical interconnects will help immensely.
We may also see things like off chip SRAM come back into vogue once its feasible to take advantage of their performance.
> On chip signals can be much faster because they don’t have the capacitive load.
You can routinely achieve > 30 Gb/s off-chip in copper cables over distances > 1 m using differential signaling [1]. Capacitive load is only a limiting factor if you directly drive the gate of a transistor.
[1] For example, high-end Xilinx FPGAs provide several of those transceivers. They really operate at > 30 GHz.