I guess chiplets will help with yield issues, which could make some nodes economical (which is of course what Moore’s law is all about). But of course they won’t allow them to get down to transistor sizes that they just couldn’t hit at all.
I guess chiplets will help with yield issues, which could make some nodes economical (which is of course what Moore’s law is all about). But of course they won’t allow them to get down to transistor sizes that they just couldn’t hit at all.
Lego-ing out IP blocks could be really cool. It would be neat if this gave OEMs room to compete in a more technical field (selling Xeons in Dell cases vs Xeons in Lenovo cases is not very cool, if Dell and Lenovo could pick the parts in their package, that could be interesting).
For instance, let's say you bought a new PC in 2017 with a high end graphics card. Your CPU was probably manufactured on 14nm processes, your GPU on 16nm, your RAM from 16 to 20nm, and your motherboard chipset on 22nm. It's been a similar story throughout computing.
Taking that idea and scaling it down to processor designs themselves is cool and no doubt faces hard technical challenges.
AMD has used the same IO die across multiple generations of Zen hardware. This cuts the dev and validation costs for using new processes.
Fungibility helps reduce the cost of making SKUs. Want more cores? Add more compute dies. Your customers want more big chips then expected? It's easier/faster to adapt production since only the final steps differ. The component pieces are the same.