although transistors still keep on shrinking it's getting more and more
difficult to pack as many of them on a chip as we'd like partial solutions to
this such as using chiplets to reduce the rate of manufacturing defects and
stacking transistors on top of each other have been in vogue for a while now
but it might not be too surprising that some manufacturers have decided to
simply make the chips themselves bigger when in doubt supersize
now i'm not saying that your next computer might have a CPU that's so big
it'll take up half the motherboard but when you get away from personal
computers and start looking at chips that we might see in data centers in the
near future you start seeing some pretty eye-watering stuff
we're talking about designs like the wafer scale engine 2 from cerebros
currently the largest chip in the world built on a seven nanometer process and
contains 850 000 cores and is a whopping 21.5
centimeters or 8.5 inches long that's
more total area than 25 ryzen desktop cpus perhaps unsurprisingly a chip this
big and with this many transistors 2.6
trillion to be exact requires a lot of power the wafer scale engine 2 sucks
down 15 kilowatts so if you were somehow
able to drop this into your pc you'd need 15 1000 watt power supplies just to
keep it fit that's not even counting the rest of the system but despite this the
new design should actually result in power savings you see data centers and
supercomputers that do artificial intelligence processing often have to
use lots of separate chips such as gpus spread across a large facility having
the same amount of computing power on just one physical chip is far more power
efficient even if the power consumption rating of that chip is a lot higher than
a typical GPU but there are other advantages to this approach besides just
saving energy you might be wondering why we aren't simply just sticking a bunch
of chiplets onto one package instead to make something like a really big version
of an AMD epic processor and we'll tell you why right after we think ifixit for
sponsoring this video ifixit wants to help you fix all of your devices so you
never have to pay for a costly replacement again from your xbox to your
toothbrush i fix it as parts and guides for almost any device you can think of
they have over 70 000 step-by-step guides with photos to make it easy check
out ifixit.com techwiki to pick up a repair kit and join the right to repair
movement today so as versatile as chiplets have been
they still suffer from having more latency than one big monolithic
processor the little interconnects that move data between chiplets as quick as
they may be and they are fast are still slower than if you physically
put computing units directly adjacent to each other to form one big chip
ultimately this means that huge monolithic chips can process more data
than a system with the same number of transistors spread out among multiple
chips and when you consider just how much data has to be processed for ai
applications and scientific research it makes a difference wafer scale
technology has already drawn interest from diverse industries including
national intelligence and healthcare but though it has some obvious advantages
that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the silver bullet to large-scale compute
challenges for instance one big issue is the fact that these processors are
designed to handle lots of data so they also need access to
a lot of memory and designs with chiplets and larger amounts of memory
built on the same package may end up being more popular this is similar to
what tesla has done with their new d1 chip which was developed in part to help
propel tesla's self-driving ai technology the d1 chip itself is much
smaller than the wafer scale engine but tesla has included over 11 gigabytes of
high speed sram in an arrangement of 25 d1 chips connected together to make a
training tile that's bigger than your head and of course making smaller chips
reduces the amount of silicon you'll waste due to manufacturing errors as we
mentioned earlier but regardless of whether a particular company is using
wafer scale or an arrangement more like teslas putting a large amount of silicon
on one plane may end up becoming an industry trend because if america has
taught us anything it's that there's a deep human need to supersize
and if you feel the need like the video or dislike the video check out our other
videos and comment below with video suggestions we make videos here get your
videos here at Techquickie don't forget to subscribe and follow
see you later