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posted by martyb on Wednesday February 19 2020, @04:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the imagine-a-Beowulf... dept.

96-Core Processor Made of Chiplets

For decades, the trend was for more and more of a computer's systems to be integrated onto a single chip. Today's system-on-chips, which power smartphones and servers alike, are the result. But complexity and cost are starting to erode the idea that everything should be on a single slice of silicon.

Already, some of the most of advanced processors, such as AMD's Zen 2 processor family, are actually a collection of chiplets bound together by high-bandwidth connections within a single package. This week at the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, French research organization CEA-Leti showed how far this scheme can go, creating a 96-core processor out of six chiplets.

The CEA-Leti chip—for want of a better word—stacks six 16-core chiplets on top of a thin sliver of silicon, called an active interposer. The interposer contains both voltage regulation circuits and a network that links the various parts of the core's on-chip memories together. Active interposers are the best way forward for chiplet technology if it is ever to allow for disparate technologies and multiple chiplet vendors to be integrated into systems, according to Pascal Vivet, a scientific director at CEA-Leti.

"If you want to integrate chiplets from vendor A with chiplets from vendor B, and their interfaces are not compatible, you need a way to glue them together," he says. "And the only way to glue them together is with active circuits in the interposer."


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Snotnose on Wednesday February 19 2020, @05:40PM (1 child)

    by Snotnose (1623) on Wednesday February 19 2020, @05:40PM (#959925)

    Reminds me of the AMD 2900 family of chips. The board I was programming in the 80s had a 96 bit bus, and with every instruction I controlled 4 different things: 1) ALU 2) Memory access 3) Stack; and 4) Program counter.

    The downside of course was I averaged maybe 2 lines of code a day. But damn, for the time that thing was blazing fast in it's application. Not to mention some of the most fun I've ever had programming.

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    Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
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  • (Score: 2) by Snotnose on Thursday February 20 2020, @12:28AM

    by Snotnose (1623) on Thursday February 20 2020, @12:28AM (#960092)

    I was too busy this morning to provide a link, but here it is. [wikipedia.org]

    I still have my Mick & Brick book, it's pretty much brand new. I used the hardware guy's book to get going, this was back in the days of 6-8 weeks for cereal boxtops delivery, let alone a tech book that took much longer. After 6 week's I didn't need my own book any more :) Now that I'm older and wiser I would have given him my brand spankin new book, but I was young and "whoo hoo! New book!"

    CSB
    4 years ago I retired and joined a 55+ exercise club. Met a woman there and we got to talking. Turned out her husband was the guy that designed the hardware I turned into a software professional on, way back in '80 or so. Her husband designed the bit slice board I so fondly remember.

    Met Roger 4 years ago for lunch, damn, dude got old. Funny how that happens. Still a great guy but damn, he got old.

    --
    Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.