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Comment by tikkun | Hacker News Reader

I'm mostly meaning: will the best chips (CPUs and GPUs) in 2030 use this method, or not?

The best chips TODAY use chiplets. Check out Epyc, Ponte Vecchio, all high end GPUs and ML accelerators using HBM memory. A chiplet is generally defined as a chip/die with custom interfaces for in package communication.

I think what they are asking is if chiplets have a durable advantage, or a transitory one.

The current leading edge processing products moved to chiplets because it was the optimal/only solution from a cost and performance perspecitve. If we assume that reticle sizes will stay roughly similar and process scaling will continue to slow, then it would seem that the future bends further toward chiplets...

Yes this is basically it. Reticle size is at the limit. Barring some sort of quantum optical revolution, we need chiplets to make more complex chips.

Also the amount of heat in a given area is rising. We need to spread it out or find some really innovative ways of dumping the heat.

I suspect as time goes on, prices per transistor will become absurdly cheap but you'll need to do things like have redundant hardware running half the time to get rid of the heat.

Barring some unexpectedly big breakthroughs in things like 3d stacking or in improving yields for increasingly complex process nodes, chips in 2030 will definitely be using this method.

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