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I don't think you realize the history of wafer-scale integration and what it means for the chip industry [1]. The approach was famously taken by Gene Amdahl's T
by twothreeone 1y ago
I don't think you realize the history of wafer-scale integration and what it means for the chip industry [1]. The approach was famously taken by Gene Amdahl's Trilogy Systems in the 80ies, but failed dramatically leading to (among others) deployment of "accelerator cards" in the form of.. the NVIDIA GeForce 256, the first GPU in 1999. It's not like NVIDIA hasn't been trying to integrate multiple dies in the same package, but doing that successfully has been a huge technological hurdle so far.
[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9623424 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9623424
- averne_ 1y agoThe main reason a wafer scale chip works there is because their cores are extremely tiny, and silicon area that gets fused off in the event of a defect is much lower than on NVIDIA chips, where a whole SM can get disabled. AFAIU this approach is not easily applicable to complex core designs.
- xadhominemx 1y agoI understand that topic well. They stitched top metal layers across the reticle - not that challenging, and the foundational IP is not their own. Everyone else went the CoWoS direction, which enables heterogeneous integration and much more cost effective inference.