The paper quoted:
"To minimize memory latency these 4B machines will likely be smoking-hairy-golf-balls3. The processor will be one large chip wrapped in a memory package about the size of a golf ball. The surface of the golf ball will be hot and hairy: hot because of the heat dissipation, and hairy because the machine will need many wires to connect it to the outside world."
With a footnote:
"Frank Worrell used this metaphor in 1985."
The paper is here:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gray/papers/su...
It's very interesting reading, especially when you look at how much he got right.
We don't quite have those smoking hairy golfballs just yet but we're slowly getting there.
Ideally for volumes, yes, one would go for spheres. But in reality more often than not that translates to a cylinder because of technology trade-offs, with perhaps some endcaps. And not surprisingly, computing has already been there and done that.
If you take a bunch of compute nodes, roll the rack row up to minimize cable length, you end up with ...a classic Cray design from the '80s. And yes, the wiring in the middle of a cylindrical Cray was as 3D as it could physically get...
Looking at the picture, the technology of the era was an obvious dead-end:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Cray-1-p...
and the trend is clear, just as it was back then with VLSI. Now the race is on to integrate those wires at a very large scale... (Cray also had a classic, visually appealing design approach to dump the heat, not unlike the enthusiast PC market today with commercial liquid coolers and some high-end HPCs)
Xilinx is already doing something like this: https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/showwiki.php?title=Semi+Wiki:...
Eventually this might even converge on something like a spherical shape, that's when the sum length of the connections is minimal (the surface area of the sphere is too, and that again is a heat removal problem).