At the nanometer scale, the focus of micro-architecture will move from processing to communication. Most general computer architectures to date have been based on a "stored program" paradigm that differentiates between memory and processing and relies on communication over busses and other (relatively) long distance mechanisms. Nanometer-scale electronics --- nanoelectronics - promises to fundamentally change the ground-rules. Processing will be cheap and plentiful, interconnection expensive but pervasive. This will tend to move computer architecture in the direction of locally-connected, reconfigurable hardware meshes that merge processing and memory. If the overheads associated with reconfigurability can be reduced or even eliminated, architectures based on non-volatile, reconfigurable, fine-grained meshes with rich, local interconnect offer a better match to the expected characteristics of future nanoelectronic devices.
展开▼
