Will 2D meshes replace hypercubes?

The authors analytically investigate and derive the speedup provided by 2-D meshes over hypercubes for several common communication patterns. They take into consideration the difference in channel widths, the communication rates, and the effect of worm-hole routing. The 2-D meshes are shown to provide significant speedups if effects of contentions can be ignored. For large networks having hundreds of nodes, contentions become significant, reducing the speedups. Appropriate mapping and routing may be used to reduce the contentions while retaining the speedups.<>