External Processor's

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Dumb question? probably....

However, would it be possible to make an external processor that could plug into a futuristic (spelling?) mobo outlet? Using something similar to a sata cable. Sure it sounds dumb, but would this ever be possible... Why or why not?

No reason to flame, just a simple question.
 
Sure it's possible. If there was interest in it, they could do it now. Basically you are talking about the wiring of the motherboard. If you look at the back of a motherboard you will see all the "silver lines" on the board. Those silver lines are like tiny wires. In order to have an external processor you would just need to run wires from the correct "silver lines" on the board.
 
Quite Possible

Wikipedia Socket 1. It is a now outdated Intel socket for processors. The interesting thing about it is that the processor came attached to a board that you would install much like a pci card. So if you could make some custom hardware and you could slide it into a PCI slot.

It is worth pointing out that essentially what you want to do, we do every day. What you want is to add processors to a system so that the load can be spread around.

What people forget is that inside the swanky graphics card is a processor (usually about 500 MHz) called the GPU (graphic processing unit) and it processes information that the CPU would have otherwise done. You can also as a physics card which has a processor in it that calculates physics information for games taking load of the CPU.

You can add a special NIC card (such as KillerNIC [I love these]) which has a processor in it that takes care of TCP packet hashes, SSL, etc.

So I guess what you want essentially already exists. Its just not as cool as you want it to be.

Beside, with the way the number of cores in CPU's are going up, what a system needs is not to be able to add processing power (the CPU is not used as much as you'd think) but things like memory and drive access time that slow computers.
 
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^^ That's not what he's talking about. He is wondering if *some day* you can have the CPU moved from inside the computer, to say an external box that can be swapped out as simply as removing a plug.

Yes there are processors built-in to video cards (GPU), sound cards (SPU), network cards (NPU), etc, however again that isn't what he's talking about. BTW, network managing uses so little processing power on today's multi-core processors, you don't see a performance gain by offloading network tasks to a 200MHz dedicated NPU.
 
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