Moore’s Law is dead – Long live the chiplet

For dummies like me who didn&#x27;t know what a chiplet is:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chiplet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chiplet</a><p>This seems to be about the third reason listed:<p>&gt; Known good die (KGD): chiplets can be tested before assembly, improving the yield of the final device<p>Problem:<p><pre><code> &gt; In general, a killer defect is defined as a defect that is 20% the size of the fabrication node. For &gt; example, a defect that is less than 9nm may be acceptable for the 45nm fabrication node, but a defect &gt; larger than 2.8nm would be defined as a “killer” defect for the 14nm fabrication node. For the 5nm &gt; fabrication node, a defect measuring only 1nm could be a killer. &gt; &gt; This is one of the primary reasons that it has become increasingly difficult to yield large monolithic &gt; ICs (as measured in die area) when using leading edge fabrication process technology </code></pre> Solution: I understood it from the visual explanation in the first chip image (AMDArt2 png) and its description in this article:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nextplatform.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;06&#x2F;09&#x2F;amd-on-why-chiplets-and-why-now&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nextplatform.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;06&#x2F;09&#x2F;amd-on-why-chiplets-...</a>

Moore’s law is alive but the benefits are diminishing.<p>Until 2005 or so, shrinking transistors automatically increased speed and reduced power consumption. When that ran out of steam, the industry went to multi core and massive parallelism with GPUs.<p>Until recently each shrink also lowered the cost per transistor, but that seems to have run out also and has something to do with why Intel was stuck at 14nm for so long and why new GPU prices are so insane despite a collapse in demand and resolution of the supply chain crisis for high end chips.<p>Chiplets at best are neutral with regard to cost. If manufacturing overhead is low, two chiplets give you twice the transistors at twice the cost. The industry did not pursue chiplets with a lot of vigor until now because it was a less competitive approach to scaling than shrinking transistors until now.

Lotta people here not reading the article:<p>&gt; However, as it has in the past, the semiconductor ecosystem is adapting and as Chiplet technology builds traction, we will very likely see a period of accelerating innovation and new market opportunities opening as we move forward.<p>The whole premise is that chip innovation (and overall computing power) is continuing to accelerate, even though &quot;Moore&#x27;s Law as we&#x27;ve known it&quot; has ended

Wouldn’t this mean that we should focus on writing more efficient code than before?<p>Especially in the startup space I saw companies building software with the hypothesis “users need the latest device for our product and they will get faster anyway so we don’t need optimize our code. Instead we deliver features on max speed skipping optimizations and wait until our users upgraded to newer devices during the coming 2-4 years”.

Even if the Moore&#x27;s law is not dead, single-thread performance and clock frequency have plateaued 10 years ago. This is the key factor. Because of heating even if you squeeze more transistors onto a chip you need to reduce the clock, so even if you may get higher computational throughput the latency will go down. And this is another argument for chiplets or any other alternative computational architectures.

Jim Keller: Moore’s Law is Not Dead<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc</a>

Moore’s law was a marketing road map for intel.<p>It was basically a monopolistic warning from one of the founders not to release new products too fast so the company wouldn’t burn out. It worked. But it’s not some scientific or physical law and I hate when people refer to it as such.

Moore&#x27;s Law is dead - can anyone think of a more cliche article title in the tech world?

Unless I’m missing something, the article did mention Moore’s law proper with transistor density doubling every 18 months, but then meandered to talk about other things. M1 has 16 billion transistors thanks to TSMC. Each new node has delivered on Moore’s law with AMD and Apple. I don’t doubt that Moore’s law will stop. I can even say that it Moore’s law may have failed from time to time, but the spirit of the law lives.<p>Moving to chiplets doesn’t change transistor density. This is a packaging feature and not a fabrication feature. This is done for manufacturing cost reduction and yield improvements.

I am not convinced moore&#x27;s law no longer holds true, consider that there is a third dimension that no one has yet figured out.<p>I am no silicon engineer but I suspect a chip that fully takes advantage of the third dimension would be something like a sponge full of built in channels for the working fluid to remove heat.<p>First however I suspect you will see chiplets arranged vertically like heatsink fins and the whole cpu would effectively be the water block, basically a vlsi version of the cray 3

The history of computing is moving from one paradigm to another. We are well past the fast speedups in single thread transistor-based performance phase and into the hyper-parallelization phase.<p>3d stacking is another innovation that can help.<p>But I think within a decade or two there will be a move away from silicon-only transistors to something like memristors or some type of optical or optoelectronic system that hasn&#x27;t even been invented yet. This will provide some iterations with again radical parallel interconnect and quite possibly single thread speedups.

If I got a penny everytime I hear about the death of Moore&#x27;s law..

&gt; Obviously, given these data, volume is VERY important in business models that operate with high fixed and low variable costs.<p>Off-topic but I wonder how much cheaper mobile phones would be if the manufacturers did not have to come up with a hardware design update every year or so? What if mobile phones were built to last longer, which would reduce the cost per phone due to high volume? Of course, I am not suggesting this is good for business but as a mere thought experiment.

DARPA ERI (Electronics Resurgence Initiative) has promoted chiplet interoperability and included $100M funding for open-source EDA tools, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eetimes.com&#x2F;darpa-unveils-100m-eda-project&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eetimes.com&#x2F;darpa-unveils-100m-eda-project&#x2F;</a><p><i>&gt; With $100 million in funding, the IDEAS and POSH programs ... aim to combat the growing complexity and cost of designing chips, now approaching $500 million for a bleeding-edge SoC. Essentially, POSH aims to create an open-source library of silicon blocks, and IDEAS hopes to spawn a variety of open-source and commercial tools to automate testing of those blocks and knitting them into SoCs and printed circuit boards. If successful, the programs “will change the economics of the industry,” enabling companies to design in relatively low-volume chips that would be prohibitive today.</i><p>2017 vision, slide #22, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.darpa.mil&#x2F;attachments&#x2F;eri_design_proposers_day.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.darpa.mil&#x2F;attachments&#x2F;eri_design_proposers_day.p...</a><p><pre><code> My DARPA dream $ git clone https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;darpa&#x2F;idea $ git clone https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;darpa&#x2F;posh $ cd posh $ make soc42 </code></pre> ERI Summit 2019, Intelligent Design of Electronic Assets (IDEA) &amp; Posh Open Source Hardware (POSH), <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pJubnAN3VKw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pJubnAN3VKw</a><p>UCSD OpenRoad, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theopenroadproject.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theopenroadproject.org&#x2F;</a> &amp; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vlsicad.ucsd.edu&#x2F;Publications&#x2F;Conferences&#x2F;378&#x2F;c378.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vlsicad.ucsd.edu&#x2F;Publications&#x2F;Conferences&#x2F;378&#x2F;c378.p...</a><p><i>&gt; OpenROAD is a front-runner in open-source semiconductor design automation tools and know-how. Our project reduces barriers of access and tool costs to democratize system and product innovation in silicon. The OpenROAD tool and flow provide autonomous, no-human-in-the-loop, 24-hour RTL-GDSII capability to support low-overhead design exploration and implementation through tapeout. We welcome a diverse community of designers, researchers, enthusiasts and entrepreneurs who use and contribute to OpenROAD to make a far-reaching impact.</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semiengineering.com&#x2F;will-open-source-eda-work&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semiengineering.com&#x2F;will-open-source-eda-work&#x2F;</a><p><i>&gt; All the big EDA providers, as well as leading chip companies, are active contributors to ERI projects. In fact, Cadence, Synopsys, Mentor, NXP, Intel, IBM, Intel, Qualcomm, Arm, Nvidia, Analog Photonics, SRI International and Applied Materials all have contributed speakers and engineers or materials to ERI effort ... the key to getting industry players to accept open-source EDA is whether it makes the design process more efficient without breaking anything—and whether it is possible to extract decades worth of design experience from libraries of millions of existing designs and use that to spot errors in real time in existing designs.</i>

The rising cost of software in the design process is startling. I wonder what opportunity there is for new entrants to reduce that cost.

At least Proebsting&#x27;s Law doesn&#x27;t look so depressing anymore, by comparison: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;proebsting.cs.arizona.edu&#x2F;law.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;proebsting.cs.arizona.edu&#x2F;law.html</a>

Cerebras&#x27; WFE is just a large chiplet.

Latest death of Moore Law<p>Shocking

The number of people predicting the end of Moore&#x27;s Law doubles every 2 years