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Comment by gigatexal | Hacker News Reader

Any hardware gurus out there care to tak about how this helps? I guess having a flat pool of heterogenous resources is nice. As long as there’s a decent SDK that abstracts the hard stuff away I’m all for it.

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It won't be user-facing, so there won't be an SDK. It's a way of building chips better,like AMD's Infinity Fabric. You could integrate GPUs, multiple CPU dies (like Epyc), and DRAM on a single package and tie them all together with interposers, which would look to the user like a CPU with an integrated GPU and a big L4 cache.

Using multiple small dies and tying them together has several advantages. Small dies yield better, so sometimes several small dies are cheaper than one large one. There's also versatility because you can mix and match components.

As I see it, this is just a network on interposer instead of a network on chip (NoC). NoCs have simple rules for routing that also prevent deadlocks, so I am not sure that the idea here is that significant. The active interposer is a quite new idea. I haven’t followed it. Maybe the journalist found the rules more exiting than the active interposer idea.

Either way, the research is one of the many small steps forward to better chips.

>As long as there’s a decent SDK that abstracts the hard stuff away

I'd be very skeptical of that. See: Cell Broadband Engine.

Oh yeah it took what 8 years to get decent ps3 games?

I don't think that's even needed. I just assume what you'll see from inside the program is some resources connected to some sort of very fast interconnect. It's nowhere near what Cell was - a really bad barrel-like PPC core that had to manage DMA to feed a bunch of marginally-smarter-than-DSP cores (with an incompatible ISA, obviously) that had no access to the main memory.

Pointing to one example of someone failing to do something in the past is not strong evidence it won’t happen this time. If anything there was lessons learned from that failure.

That’s very true, too.

A more modular package brings a variety of benefits. Small chips are cheaper per unit area, because yields are higher. Reuse in different products can also lower development costs. Different IP can live on the most appropriate technology node- mature & cheap, new & fast, etc. IP can be developed on different schedules. IP from completely different companies can be integrated more easily. (see the intel-AMD partnership, it's "chiplet")

It's really not that complicated an idea- modular packages are more flexible! What's new is making it work within a compelling power, price, and performance envelope.

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