Network on Chip: Higher Dimensions.

(Not examinable for part II).

Can we consider higher-dimensional interconnect ?

The hypercube has lowest diameter for number of customers. But it has excessive wiring.

Chips are two-dimensional so perhaps it's good to use a 2-D network ? But this may be overly conservative.

Maybe use 2.5-D ? have a small number of `multi-hop' links?

On benign (load-balanced) traffic, the flattened butterfly approaches the cost/performance of a butterfly network and has roughly half the cost of a comparable performance clos network.

Further details (non examinable): "The advantage over the clos is achieved by eliminating redundant hops when they are not needed for load balancing." See `Flattened butterfly : a cost-efficient topology for high-radix networks' by John Kim, William J. Dally, Dennis Abts.

Typical NoC designs use credit-based flow control where counters remotely track the amount of receive buffer space available at the destination.

A so-called `cut-through' routing node starts forwarding the start of a packet before the end of it is received. This is the alternative to store-and-forward.