Package up CPUs and the needed cooling and buffer ram in a Hard drive chasis. Drive bays can act as more CPU processing since all software now makes use of the ubiquitous threading. With some transformational drivers of course.
One downside is it might be a bit slower because of the secondary bus but now any NAS can now be proportioned to a cluster.
Another downside is that the primary CPU is going to be heavy on the scheduling if the bus chip set aren't programmable enough. This is very dependant how thread capable the total hardware is.
We are going this way but solid state RAM could also be a harddrive package. More long term memory though because of the slow interface.-- wjt, Jan 29 2021 Auxiliary CPUs are WKTI, but the drive packaging isn't. I keep waiting for a consumer architecture that allows it: 40 years and counting. It wouldn't even be that hard anymore now that so much is being farmed out to the GPU. A Single very high speed CPU with all star support would be best for this.
Take the latest Ryzen. Expand branch prediction logic. Give it twice the L1, 60 times the L2, and a couple gigabytes of core speed RAM as a quazi L3. Cool it out the wazoo and give it 16 individual PCIE lanes. Give it CPU level connections to the main CPU, main memory, and the PCIE bus. Assign it those tasks that have high usage on one CPU and only one CPU.
It will double CPU performance for only four times the price, I guarantee it.-- Voice, Jan 29 2021 It looks to me that the computer architecture is moving in the opposite direction, instead of CPUs moving toward the drives we now have the storage moving toward the CPU. It was great big spinning lumps of metal on the end of 12" ribbon cables to chips in M.2 slots 2" from the CPU... oh, that reminds me, I have a SATA drive in a -80C freezer somewhere!-- bs0u0155, Jan 29 2021 Out of interest, it might be worth putting a roll of punched paper tape, and a deck of 80-column cards, in the freezer with the drive and see if there's any data degradation.
What about lasering QR codes onto a slab of polished granite ? Probably fairly durable.-- 8th of 7, Jan 29 2021 // It looks to me that the computer architecture is moving in the opposite direction //
Perhaps we could sphericalize the design, so everything would be right next to or merely across the sphere from everything else.-- whatrock, Jan 29 2021 //slab of polished granite// Too easily abraded by glaciation.-- pocmloc, Jan 29 2021 //punched paper tape, and a deck of 80-column cards,//
hmm, what I can try is using liquid nitrogen to overclock my copy of Stryer's Biochemistry (4th ed. I won't have anything to do with anything other than the red cover).-- bs0u0155, Jan 29 2021 You need to apply the liquid nitrogen to your brain, not to the book.-- pocmloc, Jan 29 2021 That would be a trick, giving each neuron the optimum environmental temperature for maximum performance. Probably a really ugly looking hat.-- wjt, Jan 29 2021 // a really ugly looking hat. //
And they called poor old Joe Biden a "fashion victim" ...
// sphericalize the design //
"hypercube", tesseract, and similar interconnection geometries in higher dimensions are Baked and WKTE.
What the idea is actually describing is a Blade server and backplane, which are also Baked and WKTE.-- 8th of 7, Jan 30 2021 random, halfbakery