What They Say
Bob O’Donnell is an analyst that we pay attention to (and he sometimes contributes DD articles). When he says something is important, I pay attention. He said that an announcement last week about a a new industry consortium and semiconductor industry standard, called Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (or UCIe), is ‘incredibly important’.
Basically, the gist of his article is that as Moore’s Law runs out of steam, new chip architectures are needed. The new standard is intended to define a new way to interconnect small chips (the ‘chiplets’) to allow the development of chips that are built ‘Lego-fashion’. As he said
Want to mix an Intel CPU with an AMD GPU, a Qualcomm modem, a Google TPU AI accelerator and a Microsoft Pluton security processor onto a single chip package, or system on package (SOP)? When UCIe-based products start to get commercialized in say the 2024-2025 timeframe, that’s exactly what you should be able to do.
Critically, the initiative is backed by Intel, AMD, Arm, Qualcomm, Samsung, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, as well as chipmakers TSMC and ASE.
As well as allowing this ‘Pick & Mix’ of chips, the concept will allow the combination of devices using different notes of manufacture. Many radios and other chips are better when made on bigger nodes than the state of the art. UCIe will allow them to be combined.
A white paper on the interconnect can be downloaded here.
What We Think
Bob pointed out that Apple and Nvidia are missing from an ideal list of participants, but he wrote it before Apple announced its M1 Ultra which combines two chips in Appe’s own unique way. (Apple Gives a Peek at a New Monitor, Tablets, Macs, iPhones….). Maybe Nvidia also has something like this planned.
This news is really interesting for a range of video-related applications. It could be really handy to combine different chiplets for video processing or other signal processing. It could enable smaller specialist companies to enhance the CPUs, GPUs and other volume chips of the ‘big boys’. (BR)
