all other things being equal the more transistors you have on a processor the
more features and performance you get and ever since the 1970s manufacturers
have been finding ways to shove more and more transistors onto a single chip by
making the transistors smaller in fact the widely quoted moore's law that
anticipated that the number of transistors on a CPU would double
roughly every two years held true for decades
but in recent years moore's law has started to look more like moore's pipe
dream as it's becoming harder and harder
to keep shrinking transistors down due to the chemical properties of silicon
so how do we solve this problem and keep making our computers and our gadgets
faster and faster well although the industry has been
looking at making smaller transistors on materials other than silicon as we
briefly discussed in this video another idea that seems to be catching on is
using something called chiplets now traditionally the dye or the part of
a CPU that contains the transistors is
manufactured as a single monolithic piece so there are practical limits to
how big you can make them before the likelihood of a fatal defect landing on
your die becomes too high by contrast
chiplets are modular mini dies that can
be combined into one CPU package to
improve performance but i mean hold on a minute here you guys
might say well what's the point of all this if the transistors are the same
size anyway aren't you just adding an assembly step and making it take up more
room well as it turns out oftentimes
chiplet-based cpus are indeed larger think of AMD's new
epic series of server processors as an example
however they're also hugely advantageous
when you consider yields so if you're not familiar with the
concept of yields here's what it means cpus are manufactured on large silicon
wafers and that manufacturing process
isn't perfect which means that on a given wafer there will be some number of
defects so if we take our wafer and divide it into smaller chiplets it means
less wasted silicon for each defect and
it also makes it easier to take the chiplets that are functional but that
don't perform as well and combine those into lower end products salvaging back
some of the cost on a large scale this leads to faster
manufacturing and lower costs with significant real world benefits in fact
AMD's epic cpus only cost about half as
much thanks to chiplets versus using one
large die now although chiplets are more common in
the high-end desktop and server markets right now the technology will most
likely trickle down to the consumer space such as with AMD's rumored
upcoming 16 core ryzen CPU
that's going to put pressure on Intel to reduce their prices which might force
them to pursue chiplet-based designs as well
another fun benefit is that chiplets also allow manufacturers to separate out
parts of the CPU that don't handle pure number crunching such as input and
output blocks as it's often harder to shrink those parts of a processor down
so then you can just tack those bits on separately and attach
as many chiplets as you want connecting them together with a high speed
interface like AMD's infinity fabric now
of course the obvious drawback of size
still does exist but until we run up against the limits
imposed by signals moving at the speed of light within a microprocessor
chiplets do seem to be one of the best paths forward
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