Chiplet Strategy is Key to Addressing Compute Density Challenges

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Chiplet integration can enable disaggregated server, heterogenous computing and domain-specific acceleration within data centers.

www.eetasia.com, Sept. 29, 2021 – 

Data center workloads are quickly evolving, demanding high compute density with varying mixes of compute, memory and IO capability. This is driving architectures that are moving away from a one-size-fits-all monolithic solution to disaggregated functions that can be independently scaled for specific applications.

It is imperative to adopt the latest process nodes to deliver the needed compute density. However, doing so with traditional monolithic SoCs presents an inherent disadvantage due to escalating costs and time to market challenges resulting in unfavorable economics. To address this dilemma, chiplet-based integration strategies are emerging where compute can benefit from the most advanced process nodes, while application-specific memory and IO integrations can reside on mature trailing process nodes.

Further, disaggregating a solution into its composable parts opens the door for an ecosystem of partners who can independently develop optimized chiplets which can then be heterogeneously mixed and matched into a variety of highly differentiated and cost-effective solutions.

The chiplet approach strikes a balanced trade-off, able to deliver a plethora of domain specific solutions from a set of composable chiplet functions over a monolithic approach. Compute chiplet(s) tend to rapidly adopt the leading-edge process nodes for the best performance, power and area. Conversely, memory and IO functionality utilize mixed-signal capabilities which benefit less from the latest node and require longer validation cycles, so a chiplet integration on a mature trailing process node is more advantageous.

Since the configuration of memory and IOs is typically workload-specific, chiplet integration on a more cost-effective node tends to be a high value and differentiated SoC development. On the other hand, the compute chiplet becomes more general, able to amortize the higher leading-edge node cost across a wider range of applications and a higher asset management opportunity. Finally, a system integrator can mix and match chiplets to ad

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