Live data from Hacker News

Single-chip processors have reached their limits

spectrum.ieee.org

51–60 of 159 posts

Re: Single-chip processors have reached their limits

#51
post #6

The best chiplet interconnect may turn out to be no interconnect at all. Wafer scale integration [1] has come up periodically over the years. In short, just make a physically larger integrated circuit, potentially as large as the entire wafer -- like a foot across. As I understand it, there's no particular technical hurdle, and indeed the progress with self-healing and self-testing designs with redundancy to improve…

To clarify and contextualize a bit what you're saying: The one big obstacle in creating larger chips is defects. There's just a statistical chance of there being a defect on any given surface area of the wafer, defect which generally breaks the chip that occupies that area of the wafer. So historically, the approach was to make more smaller chips and trash those chips on the wafer affected by defects. Then came the "…

The other one big obstacle is chips are square while wafers are round.

Re: Single-chip processors have reached their limits

#52
post #6

The best chiplet interconnect may turn out to be no interconnect at all. Wafer scale integration [1] has come up periodically over the years. In short, just make a physically larger integrated circuit, potentially as large as the entire wafer -- like a foot across. As I understand it, there's no particular technical hurdle, and indeed the progress with self-healing and self-testing designs with redundancy to improve…

To clarify and contextualize a bit what you're saying: The one big obstacle in creating larger chips is defects. There's just a statistical chance of there being a defect on any given surface area of the wafer, defect which generally breaks the chip that occupies that area of the wafer. So historically, the approach was to make more smaller chips and trash those chips on the wafer affected by defects. Then came the "…

> changes in the way chips are designed can make them resilient to defects, so you no longer need to trash that chip on your wafer that's affected by such a defect,

no, it's basically "chiplets but you don't cut the chiplets apart". You design the chiplets to be nodes in a mesh interconnect, and failed chiplets can simply be disabled entirely and then routed around. But they're still "chiplets" that have their own functionality and provide a coarser conceptual block than a core itself and thus simplify some of the rest of the chip design (communications/interconnect, etc).

note that technically (if you don't mind the complexity) there's nothing wrong with harvesting at multiple levels like this! You could have "this chiplet has 8 cores, that one has 6, that one failed entirely and is disabled" and as long as it doesn't adversely affect program characteristics too much (data load piling up or whatever) that can be fine too.

however, there's nothing about "changes in the way the chips are designed that makes them more resilient to defects", you still get the same failure rates per chiplet, and will still get the same amount of failed (or partially failed) chiplets per wafer, but instead of cutting out the good ones and then repackaging, you just leave them all together around "route around the bad ones".

The advantage is that MCM-style chiplet/interposer packaging actually makes data movement much more expensive, because you have to run a more powerful interconnect, where this isn't moving anything "off-chip", so you avoid a lot of that power cost. There are other technologies like EMIB and copper-copper bonding that potentially can lessen those costs for chiplets of course.

What Intel is looking at doing with "tiles" in their future architectures with chiplets connected by EMIB at the edges (especially if they use copper-copper bonding) is sort of a half-step in engineering terms here but I think there are still engineering benefits (and downsides of course) to doing it as a single wafer rather than hopping through the bridge even with a really good copper-copper bond. Actual full-on MCM/interposer packaging is a step worse than cu-cu bonding and requires more energy but even cu-cu bonding is not perfect and thus not as good as just "on-chip" routing. So WSI is designed to get everything "on-chip" but without the yield problems of just a single giant chip.

Re: Single-chip processors have reached their limits

#53

I remember back in the 80's the limit was considered to be 64K RAM chips, because otherwise the defect rate would kill the yield. Of course, there's always the "make a 4 core chip. If one core doesn't work, sell it as a 3 core chip. And so on."

Hmm. I worked for a memory manufacturer in the 80s and I do not remember any limit.

Re: Single-chip processors have reached their limits

#54

"Reached their limits" - I feel like I've heard this many many times before. Not that I doubt it, but just I've also been impressed with the ingenuity that folks come up with in this space.

"There's plenty of room at the bottom."

Actually, we are getting out of room there.

that speech is about 80 years old nowadays. There was plenty of room at that time.

Of course, it also speculated that we would move into quantum computers at some point, what is still a possibility, but now we know that quantum computers won't solve every issue.

Re: Single-chip processors have reached their limits

#55
I hope we are going to get back to a more asymmetric multi-processing arrangement in the near term where we abandon the fiction of a processor or two running the whole show with peripheral systems that have as little smarts as possible and promote them to at least second class citizens.

These systems are much more powerful than when these abstractions were laid down, and at this point it feels like the difference between redundant storage on the box versus three feet away is more academic than anything else.

Re: Single-chip processors have reached their limits

#56

The M1 Ultra is fabricated as a single chip. The 12900K is fabricated as a single chip and is still a quarter the size of the M1 Ultra. Ryzen 3 puts 8 cores on a CCX instead of four because DDR memory controllers don't have infinite memory bandwidth (contrary to AMD's wishful nomenclature) and make shitty interconnects between banks of L3. Chiplets are valid strategies that are going to be used in the future but ther…

> The M1 Ultra is fabricated as a single chip. I'm curious how much the M1 Ultra costs. It's such a massive single piece of glass I'd guess it's $1,200+. If that's the case it doesn't make sense to compare the M1 Ultra to $500 CPUs from Intel and AMD.

Dunno, M1 Ultra includes a decent GPU, which the $500 CPUs from Intel and AMD do not. Seems relatively comparable to a $700 GPU (like a RTX 3070 if you can find one) depending on what you are using. Sadly metal native games are rare, many use some metal wrapper and/or Rosetta emulation.

Seems pretty fair to compare an Intel alder lake or higher end AMD Ryzen AND a GPU (rtx 3070 or radeon 6800) to the M1 ultra, assuming you don't care about power, heat, or space.

Re: Single-chip processors have reached their limits

#57
post #6

The best chiplet interconnect may turn out to be no interconnect at all. Wafer scale integration [1] has come up periodically over the years. In short, just make a physically larger integrated circuit, potentially as large as the entire wafer -- like a foot across. As I understand it, there's no particular technical hurdle, and indeed the progress with self-healing and self-testing designs with redundancy to improve…

Sounds like a great development if it works out.

But consider also that you can stick chiplets on top of each other vertically. That means you can put chiplets much closer together than if they were constrained to exist on the same single plane of the wafer.

Now how about stacking wafers on top of wafers? That could be super, but there might be technical difficulties, which maybe sooner or later can be overcome.

Re: Single-chip processors have reached their limits

#58
post #43

Some older stuff for reference: IBM POWER5 and POWER5+ (2004&2005) are MCM designs, had 2-4 CPU chips plus cache chips in same package. Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER5

Pentium pro from 1995 had two pieces of silicon in the package: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_Pro

Re: Single-chip processors have reached their limits

#59

"Reached their limits" - I feel like I've heard this many many times before. Not that I doubt it, but just I've also been impressed with the ingenuity that folks come up with in this space.

We only have to solve one limitation per year to keep making progress year over year, and as it is, the semiconductor industry still seems to be solving large numbers of significant issues yearly. So while we don't necessarily get smooth, predictable improvement, a safe bet is that there will be continue to be useful new developments 10-20 years out, even if they don't translate to the same kinds of gains as in years past.

Re: Single-chip processors have reached their limits

#60

Are we moving this way because bigger chips with many cores have worse yields? so the answer is to make lots of little chips and fuse then together?

Well fuse is one possibility. The AMD Epyc has generally an IO+memory controller die (called IOD) + 8 chiplets that are 8 cores each for most of the Epyc chips, however not all cores are enabled depending on the SKU.

However apple's approach does allow impressive bandwidth, 2.5TB/sec which is much higher than any of the chiplet approaches I'm aware of.

Post reply on HN