[simias]

Suppose you do a simple addition on your 4096bit "CPU", you have to propagate the carry from the first 64bits to the next 64. How do you do that within your clock cycle over the internet? You'd have to pipeline them so that each subsequent 64bit add waits for the previous carry, but then wouldn't it be orders of magnitude faster to just do it on the same CPU rather than taking the time and resources to do a single 64bit add followed by a high latency network transfer? At any rate what does clock synchronization buy you here exactly, data transfer are still high-latency and high-jitter, at best you're isochronous but definitely not synchronous.

Either I completely misunderstand what you're proposing or it doesn't make sense at all.

[twoodfin]

I’m not quite sure what GP is getting at, either, but I can sort of see the lockstep synchronization described letting you build something like the original Thinking Machines Connection Machine out of more distributed parts.

The original Cray supercomputers also benefitted from a design where every wire in the pipeline was the same length for “free” synchronization courtesy of the speed of light.