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