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[alankhest]

In the terminator movie, the robot's chip was divided into cells (boxes), this is a very good idea for cooling. Modern computers are cooled by fans and water cooling, as well as passive cooling of the processor. It seems to me that it would be worth experimenting to divide the elements of the computer into cells, for example, a separate box for the processor and RAM, and for the video card, inside the box you can arrange different cooling depending on the power of the computer. You can go deeper and split the core processor elements into separate boxes for more efficient cooling and connect them with fiber optic wires. Developers please try this.

[rockmuncher]

The problem with this is bandwidth. Currently the elements of the computer, the elements that make up your aforementioned "cells" are all mounted to the motherboard and are linked by copper traces within the printed circuit board (PCB). They can relay information very quickly, and very directly. To separate them into cells and link them via fiber optics (or anything else) would need you to convert the output of one component to a fiber signal, send the fiber signal, convert the fiber signal into a signal that the receiving part would understand, and so on. If multiple components all talk to the same thing, they need conversion circuits for each send and receive signal. All communications within the computer are limited by how fast you can convert between the things that are talking between the cells. What you gain in robustness you would lose in speed.

[ThunderBeaver]

I recall about 15 years ago from a close friend that works as a US DOD Contractor specializing in software coding and electronic engineering is that they were working on computer boards with fully integrated fiber optic pathways to replace the conductive metal pathways. This would be a massive improvement for bandwidth response time less heat generation and lower operating temps. If I remember the main hurdle was developing small efficient information converters from the fiber based components to the traditional components along with the large amounts of space these programs would require. Honestly now that I think about it he was talking about A.I. research without disclosing classified info to me.

His clearance level the last time I spoke with him was Top Secret SCI Black.

I only have a standard Top Secret clearance from my military service in nuclear asset control.  

[alankhest]

Perhaps you should start by making one cell (box) with a compact motherboard, power supply and one processor. And equip this box with good passive cooling from all sides. And run a Thunderbolt 5 wire from it, at a speed of 80 Gb / s, this should be enough for data transfer. Although I do not know what speed is inside the motherboard on copper wires. And you need to work on the signal converter and bring it to perfection. After all, there are already external video cards for laptops that make them more powerful without overheating the system. It remains only to connect such systems to each other and then we can easily scale the system by adding new cells without overheating the system.

[fragn]

Magnets lol. Floating microchips arcing dc/ac... actually rendering your physical self onto a 3d platform.

[jhonalbert]

The RISC-V open instruction set architecture, and associated trend towards open source cores, will enable a new set of architectural opportunities, including options for large-scale in-memory, compute, for heterogeneous memory and for heterogeneous compute.

[alankhest]

To be honest, I'm not an expert in electronics and I don't know what opportunities the RISC-V ISA provides. But I approach the problem from the point of view of ordinary logic, I see that external video cards for laptops have already appeared, so why not make external processors and why not make it possible to connect them together. Thus, we will get computing docking stations for laptops or virtual reality helmets. Next, you need to find a way to make them wireless and that's it, we will find ourselves in the future of computer systems.

[alankhest]

This is what a new computer architecture might look like

[SIndi_7832]

That idea was stolen from ST's Transputer chip.

It was first chip that used concept of fast links to neighbour CPUs that eventually evolved into AMD's HyperTransport over next 2 decades or more and some bits of it might have even survive and be built in into incoming CXL.

First Transputer was T-414 and by the time of "Terminator 2" SGS Thomson was very busy working on their T-800 series with T-818 as its first model AFAIK.

Terminator 1 was "running" on punny 6502 ( judging by the assembly listings in his visor).
T-818 was WAY different animal. Also, SGS marketing materials with T-800 nodes looked A LOT like in "Terminator 2".

In any case, right man to answer that question would be Miles Bennet Dyson.
IIRC AMD did mop-up most of the Transputer team, so the guy might still be working for them ;o)