AMD was right about chiplets, Intel's Gelsinger all but says While some have given up on Moore’s Law, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger clearly hasn’t. “For decades now, I’ve been in the debate: is Moore’s Law dead? And the answer is no,” he said, during his keynote at the Intel Innovation event this week. Despite an ample number of naysayers, Gelsinger argues there is plenty of untapped life in …
Intel’s ambitions for this packaging tech aren’t limited to its own silicon. The company is a founding member of the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) consortium working to standardize the way chiplets from various vendors talk to one another. UCIe has already seen buy-in from some of the largest chipmakers and foundry operators, including TSMC and Samsung Electronics.
Tell me that is not for and/or not SMARTR Advanced IntelAIgent Virtual Machine Makeover and TakeOver of New World Order Programming Systems Administration and we will have to agree to disagree.
It not as if such progress and fundamental change though is not sorely needed and long overdue is it, whenever one ponders and wonders on the sorry sad disintegrating state of the human made worlds around you which surround and hold you captivated and imprisoned servering to their exclusive elite executive sysadmins needs and greeds with your feeds and seeds.
Bravo the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) consortium ..... nice to see you, to see you nice.
Plus, of course, Intel used chiplets in the Pentium Pro. Arguably the were significantly larger than "chiplet" in the current sense, but using the technology of the time they certainly qualify as such in terms of design.
Always wanted one of those things, at the minimum of a beautiful coffee table / conversation piece. If only I could deal with useless clutter :-p
back in the 90s I got a Pentium Pro keychain from Intel. Still have it, not in the best of shape but really shows the two "chiplets" quite well. Also got a big poster, maybe it was a calendar poster I don't remember of the ASCI Pentium Pro supercomputer? I don't have the poster anymore. Also have a couple Pentium Pro CPUs, at least one of them on the underside with the pins the circuitry is protected by a layer of plastic or plastic like material, I cut most of that off after I got it to see the inside. Another one of my PPros is ceramic(?) so can't open it (easily anyway).
took a couple pictures to show: http://elreg.nateamsden.com/ppro.jpg
Honestly, Moore's law as he spoke it is dead, but "more than Moore" (MtM) is alive and well with some creating thinking.
I do think folks are overlooking some advantages that chiplets bring to AMD
1. AMD can simply vary the number of chiplets in a package to deliver multiple product families, both server and desktop
2. AMD can direct flows of chiplets to the highest margin sector cheaper and quicker than monolithic dies
3. AMD can engineer/optimize entire product families by improving one chiplet design!
4. Smaller dies lead to better binning with these new variable fab processes, for example low power chiplets go to servers, high performance & power chiplets to workstations, slow and hot to desktops
Disadvantages are more wafer lost to sawing, more expensive packaging, more dies to handle and test.
The higher power draw of chiplets on first glance should lead to a more power-hungry CPU, but in practice this is not true as a large monolithic die has to be powered to the lowest performing transistors on the die, while can be binned to create CPUs which more than recover that energy cost.
So much better than talking about IoT or VR glasses (past Intel CEOs), or talking about spending less time in meetings (name left unsaid - not that the concept is wrong, just that such policies could be quietly delegated to make room for bigger decisions at the top).
Gelsinger's head is at least pointed in the right direction, which isn't too much to ask for a $150 million/yr salary.
It was never a law but an extrapolation of observation, dead in original form for nearly 20 years.
Oddly 2003 was approximately peak GUI for MS and also the last true Communicator (Peak Nokia).
I used https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd to clone a VM file from my 2002 Laptop with XP and install that on Linux Mint. Makes native Win 10 / Win 11 look stupid.
I can't do many computer activities much faster than in 2002. I need the bigger HDD + SSD hybrid combo, more RAM and faster CPU for sensible boot time and user performance with today's bloated applications and OSes. Also all the files accumulated since 1992.
The 24" 4K screen is nicer than the 2002 1600x1200 ultra sharp laptop screen. I think I got first DVD player in 2004, which is a big step up from VHS and Video CD. Still goes. The BD player is nice on the 55" 4K screen but few disks are better than the best DVDs, which are just as good via Component from the old DVD player as from either BD player (one bought this year).
Chiplets aren't new. Nor are multiple chips on PCB, alumina (Hybrid 2" x 1" since 1970s!) sapphire or glass. Filtering down from military & aerospace.
The funny thing is that Altera was preparing a next FPGA generation (Stratix 10) using chiplets, at the time they were bought by Intel (2015-16).
And Altera were the perennial runner-up to Xilinx, as AMD used to be vs Intel.
Being hungry clearly stimulates innovation...
To complete the inversion of usual runner-up relationships that sees Intel lagging AMD in CPUs, their FPGA are currently ahead of Xilinx, and they have just announced new FPGAs that _don't_ use chiplets.
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