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Arm and TSMC Showcase 7nm Chiplet, Eight A72 at 4GHz on CoWoS Interposer
- phkahler 7y agoDid I miss it, or was there no mention of power consumption? We know they have lower perf/mhz but if they're low enough power they might be decent per watt.
- DuskStar 7y ago> When it comes to overall efficiency of LIPINCON on CoWoS, TSMC says that it features a 0.56 pJ/bit (pico-Joules per bit) power efficiency as well as a 1.6 Tb/s/mm2 (terabits per second per square millimeter) bandwidth density. Not the total power, but presumably still useful.
- mastax 7y agoFor comparison, the Infinity Fabric in EPYC used 2 pJ/bit, while EPYC Rome has "27% improved efficiency" so ~1.46 pJ/bit.
- loeg 7y agoIt's not a product you'll ever be able to buy and AFAIK it's a press piece, not something every released to 3rd parties for review: > The chip will never be sold in volume, but it proves that technologies by the two companies can enable designers to build complex chiplet-based products with unique characteristics. So it's kind of interesting from a "is it possible to take the AMD approach to ARM cores" but it's not worth evaluating too hard because, again, you can't buy it. I think ARM hopes this inspires one of the less creative licensees (Qualcom? Who else makes ARM besides Apple?) to pursue this as a product.
- discodave 7y ago> Who else makes ARM besides Apple? Amazon (via Annapurna labs) with their Nitro chips. I'm pretty sure there are more, but that's the first one that came to mind.
- panpanna 7y agoQualcomm, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, ...
- reportingsjr 7y agoThere are hundreds of companies that make or have made ARM cores, here are a few off of the top of my head: Intel, Xilinx, STMicro, NXP, silicon labs, broadcom, qualcomm, Samsung, Atmel (now microchip), etc etc.
- floatboth 7y agoAmpere (ex-APM), Marvell, Cavium (now also under Marvell), HiSilicon (Huawei), Amazon (Annapurna Labs), Fujitsu… Ampere, Cavium, HiSilicon, Fujitsu are the ones with actually custom cores.
- benj111 7y agoWhy can Arm not pursue it as a product? They already create and license cores, why not the substrate too? At the moment theres almost a binary choice for Arm using customers, either buy complete chips, or take Arm ip and roll your own, this seems like a useful third option.
- hinkley 7y agoDo chiplets give us more three-dimensional chips? If the chips are stacked on top of a communications backplane it would seem like that would be the case.
- wmf 7y agoYes, chiplets stacked on a passive silicon interposer are often called 2.5D. When you stack active dies it's called 3D integration.
- qaute 7y agoTo elaborate: A single IC die (a "chiplet" when stacked on others) is made of a layer of transistors and wiring up to several hundred nanometers thick on top of a much thicker (several hundred micrometer) silicon wafer substrate. Yep, stacking these dies ("chiplets") on top of one another is one form of 3D, and is definitely useful: IIRC, AMD's recent popular Ryzen 3000 line uses chiplets, and the Raspberry Pi's RAM chip is stacked on top the CPU (in a much cruder post-IC-manufacturing assembly process). The shorter distance between dies (compared to placing them in separate plastic packages on a PCB) can lead to maybe an order of magnitude improvement (in speed/power/etc). It's hard to stack more than a few layers. The most ambitious form of 3D design (and the one most people probably think of) is multiple thin layers of transistors on a single die ("monolithic 3D"); this would give maybe another order of magnitude improvement. Monolithic 3D memory chips are becoming popular (V-NAND, etc), with the most recent at ~100 layers. Monolithic 3D CPUs are still an unsolved problem because they need different, more difficult process steps and better heatsinks (but we're close!).