Semiconductor industry titans such as Intel, AMD, Samsung, TSMC and Arm have teamed up to announce a new universal chip interface that they hope will accelerate chip innovation in the future.
The new consortium is called Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) and its goal is to standardize die-to-die interconnects for future chipset designs with an open source approach that anyone in the industry can use.
Nvidia was notably absent from the consortium, but perhaps that doesn't matter much since the world's top three semiconductor foundries (Intel, TSMC and Samsung) are involved.
What this means for processor design will ultimately be up to engineers, but in short it will allow for better integration of chiplets, which are smaller processor components that take some of the load off the central processing cores, which also could be designed. like chips.
Part of the appeal of UCIe is that it gives the industry more flexibility in designing the processor in a way that allows it to interface with other components on a motherboard through PCIe and other connections.
Analysis: They are chiplets all the way
The chip design offers all sorts of advantages over the existing paradigm of all-in-one components.
For one thing, all chiplets don't need to use the same CPU node, so you can have a mix of 5nm chiplets that handle high-performance tasks along with 12nm and 14nm chiplets that focus more on less rigorous tasks. .
If that sounds a lot like Arm's big.LITTLE architecture design, you're not wrong. The chiplets essentially take the Arm design and extend it beyond the central processing cores.
Another benefit that UCIe provides is the flexibility to adopt more 2.5D and 3D chip technologies, as our friends at Tom's Hardware explain.
With the new open chip standard, the industry has an important new tool to address the scaling challenges presented by physics and the imminent end of Moore's Law.
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