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TSMC Shows Colossal Interposer, Says Moore's Law Still Alive
In the company's first blog post, TSMC has stated that Moore's Law is still alive and well, despite the zeitgeist of recent times being the reverse. The company also showed a colossal 2500mm2 interposer that includes eight HBM memory chips and two big processors.
Godfrey Cheng, TSMC's new head of global marketing, wrote the blog post. He notes that Moore's Law is not about performance, but about transistor density. While performance traditionally improved by increasing the clock speed and architecture, today it is more often improved by increasing parallelization, and hence requires increases in chip size. This enhances the importance of transistor density because chip cost is directly proportional to its area.
[...] "one possible future of great density improvements is to allow the stacking of multiple layers of transistors in something we call Monolithic 3D Integrated Circuits. You could add a CPU on top of a GPU on top of an AI Edge engine with layers of memory in between. Moore's Law is not dead, there are many different paths to continue to increase density."
[...] [System-technology co-optimization (STCO)] is done through advanced packaging, for which TSMC supports silicon-based interposers and fan-out-based chiplet integration. It also has techniques to stack chips on wafers, or stack wafers on top of other wafers. As one such example, TSMC showed a nearly-2500mm2 silicon interposer – the world's largest – on top of which two 600mm2 processors are placed and eight 75mm2 HBM memory chips, which makes for 1800mm2 of compute and memory silicon on top of the interposer-based package, well over two times the conventional reticle size limit.
Related: Dual-Wafer Packaging (Wafer-on-Wafer) Could Double CPU/GPU Performance
Another Step Toward the End of Moore's Law
Intel's Jim Keller Promises That "Moore's Law" is Not Dead, Outlines 50x Improvement Plan
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @03:31PM (2 children)
The Commodore 64 microcomputer of the early 80s was more advanced than that with separate chips for sound, graphics, and disk control. (The disk controller got its own 6502 variant CPU.)
IBM PC and Apple II were more "primitive" in the manner you describe.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday August 16 2019, @04:36PM (1 child)
True. It was mostly the Apple II I was thinking of. Yet they could make a real hash of offloading. The Commodore 64 disk drive was notorious for its extreme slowness. What a colossal waste of all that dedicated hardware that they couldn't make it any faster. The crazy thing even had its own power supply. Seems to be a case study of why just throwing more microcontrollers at a task doesn't necessarily make it go faster. Everyone else's disk drive, including the more primitive Apple II's, was much faster.
The stock Apple DOS 3.3 had plenty of stupidities in the code that made its disk access needlessly slow. Like, it took a fraction of a second too long to read and process a sector, so that it just missed the start of the next sector and had to wait for an entire revolution of the disk to bring the next sector past the head again. In spite of that, it was still much faster than the Commodore 64. Lots of aftermarket DOSes for the Apple II fixed that issue. As I recall, booting took 45 seconds for stock Apple DOS, and 15 seconds for an aftermarket Apple DOS. The Commodore 64 needed several minutes to read the disk, and could not be improved with a simple software change.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @08:24PM
If I recall correctly, the C64 disk drive was slow because of some bug in the drive chips that they never bothered to fix. (Time to market pressure I think.)
No matter. The problem was solved by plugging in a cartridge into the computers cartridge port that used a different routine for data transfer. Then the disk ran very fast.
The point is, the Apple did an awful lot with very little hardware, but it was an evolutionary dead end. It was the ultimate hack, a very tightly integrated system that could not be evolved as separate components.