The Kernel Hacker's Bookshelf: Ultimate Physical Limits of Computation

I imagine an ultimate laptop would look more like a dataflow machine of some sort where
functional units are connected directly to neighboring functional units rather than time
multiplexing instructions through a smaller set of functional units with all the overhead you
describe.

After all, with that many compute elements, why wouldn't you?  I imagine data storage would
largely return to a delay element model too, just for its compactness.  Since compute elements
would be in contact with all the data elements at any given time, you could easily access all
of your data in parallel and do *something* with it, even if it's just moving it along.  The
sheer dynamics of such a dense system would mean that the data has to keep moving though.