Reconfiguring computer circuitry to ease data flow

New York Times : Gains in computer power have come from making circuits smaller. But as the wires, transistors, and other circuit components shrink, their electrical resistance—and therefore their power consumption and heat output—rises. The most powerful supercomputers already consume as much power as a small town. To curb that growth, researchers at Hewlett-Packard have proposed a radical reconfiguration of a computer’s two basic elements: processor and memory. As the New York Times‘s John Markoff reports, HP’s new configuration mitigates the energy cost of shuttling information between the processor and memory by placing the two elements on top of each other. Another innovation is the use of nanotech devices known as a memristors to serve as memory stores.