IBM goes vertical with chip interconnects

IBM has announced that they're relatively close to going commercial with a "through silicon via" (TSV) technology that will enable them to create high-bandwidth connections between two or more chips in a stacked packaging format.

by stacking memory directly on top of a massively multicore processor and then having wires come up through the different points of the processor and connect directly to the memory chip, Intel claims that they can get transfer rates between the processor and memory of up to a terabyte per second.

The big news about IBM's design is that the company intends to start shipping product samples based on this technology in the second half of this year, with full production coming in 2008.