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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

96-Core Processor Made of Chiplets [ieee.org]

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.org] (ISSCC) in San Francisco, French research organization CEA-Leti [leti-cea.com] 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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