Comment Re:Ha, not the first (Score 3, Interesting) 185
building a supercomputer means getting thousands of CPUs to cooperate which is a much harder challenge.
Looking at his presentation, that seems to be his point. He concludes that power efficiency is going to become the limiting factor driving design decisions, and that since the power cost of increasing FLOPS has been so much lower than the power cost of moving larger quantities of data we're heading into an era where connectivity costs will so dominate the cost of cycles that cycles will be essentially free.
Hes's then basically arguing that it won't be cost-effective to build data transmission architectures that can effectively utilize exaflops, so no one will bother to build an exaflop machine.
He didn't state it, but if the rest of his arguments are correct, perhaps we're going to see the definition of a new metric for HPC, one that somehow captures the ability of a machine to distribute data to its computation nodes.