What causes most of the slowdown in going from CPU to main memory is the pads and PC board. On chip signals have orders of magnitude less capacitance and so can go at least an order of magnitude faster.
One technology that is being considered is optical interconnect. That would provide a tremendous speedup to this pathway. The technology isn't ready yet. I don't know how long it will take to appear.
But once you have optical interconnect, it can be used on chip as well as off chip. Recall that Herb indicated the speed limit of current processors is basically caused by interconnect. Optical interconnect changes that and greatly reduces the speed cost of long distance signaling
Perhaps vertical integration is waiting for optical interconnects, which would probably be GaAs due to higher speed than Si as well as higher efficiencies
WF
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