Whats going to happen with the pin situation?

[imported_goku]

Processors are getting more and more complex, as their complexity increases, so does their pin count. What is going to happen as the pincounts increase more and more? Sure LGA seems like the solution but the pin counts are on the rise and with that comes more problems. I mean are we really going to have processors with 10,000 pins+? how is that going to be possible? Seems like too much room for future problems. Is there another way besides using pins? Seems like BGA could have worked out (wouldn't be soldered but just attached to the processor or board and then make contact.

 

[The-Noid]

Depends how many cores you have. Instead of adding more sockets to the motherboard they have combined cores on the processor increasing the need for more pins. There is a finite number of pins though as there is only a finite amount of space. At a certain point we may see 100 core 4 socket machines only time will tell.

 

[zephyrprime]

The current chips are mounted by BGA on their little circuit boards aren't they? I think I recall that intel is developing an alternative to that but I don't think it's arrived yet.

We'll probably have to combat pincount by going to lvds ram interfaces. That will help but pincounts probably will only go down temporarily as more memory channels are added.

PCB technology hasn't changed much for a long time so maybe something clever needs to be though up there are well.

A lot of the pins on a chip are power delivery. Maybe if we could route those wires to an alternative location and connect with a higher gauge connection, that could reduct pin count dramatically. Or maybe we could create a special connector on the bottom of the chips to aggregate all those power pins into a more compact connector.