That wasn't quite a prediction, it was the prevailing spirit of the times. Ideally for volumes, yes, one would go for spheres. But in reality more often than n

That wasn't quite a prediction, it was the prevailing spirit of the times. Ideally for volumes, yes, one would go for spheres. But in reality more often than not that translates to a cylinder because of technology trade-offs, with perhaps some endcaps. And not surprisingly, computing has already been there and done that. If you take a bunch of compute nodes, roll the rack row up to minimize cable length, you end up with ...a classic Cray design from the '80s. And yes, the wiring in the middle of a cylindrical Cray was as 3D as it could physically get... Looking at the picture, the technology of the era was an obvious dead-end: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Cray-1-p1010227.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Cray-1-p... and the trend is clear, just as it was back then with VLSI. Now the race is on to integrate those wires at a very large scale... (Cray also had a classic, visually appealing design approach to dump the heat, not unlike the enthusiast PC market today with commercial liquid coolers and some high-end HPCs)