Mini-Consortia Forming Around Chiplets

The package is the new pcb.

But it’s going to be a chaotic gold rush with many competing solutions for a while, before a de facto standard will emerge (the way it usually goes).

Will it be UCIe, or something else? What will change when people introduce co packaged optics as well? Etc.

On the underlying packaging techniques there’s not many companies in the race.

I feel as a foundry, TSMC is technically most strongly positioned here: best offering across multiple technologies and definitely far ahead in offering complex chiplet based solutions.

Samsung and intel bring design into the picture as well, so they play multiple sides. Intel could have made a nice play with their foundry solutions to open up to fabless companies and their chiplet technology. But they failed to leverage that in house so far (their GPUs and accelerators, like pointe vecchio and others seem not commercially viable), which makes it much less likely to succeed in the broader market.

China also forms their own consortium https://www.tomshardware.com/news/china-develops-domestic-ch...

Chiplets and standardized hardware interfaces are a great start.

Now we just need to solve the remaining 90%: firmware, software, security, virtualization, …, …

One example of a mini consortium is the Compute Express Link (CXL) Consortium, which includes major players in the semi industry like intel amd and samsung. The consortium is focused on developing an open interconnect standard that enables chiplets to work together more efficiently in high performance computing applications. This should be promising trend for the industry , probably will lead to faster innovation and reduced costs i would think. Since increased collaboration between companies.

> chiplets have been proven to work extremely well in controlled situations.

Yeah, right. We always welcome less reliable and absolutely unrepairable video cards.