The impact of Rent's rule on massive parallelism

The effects of reimplementing a system of fixed complexity using different integration levels are studied. The obvious as well as hidden costs of extra pins in integrated circuits are discussed. It is found that Rent's rule does not apply to systems which place program memory on the same chip as the processor. The authors suggest that a solution for massively parallel systems might be to use processing elements simple enough to fit completely on a single chip, rather than faster but more complex processors that use external memory devices.<<ETX>>