Maybe I’m missing something here, but wouldn’t heat become a bigger issue? Right now we have pretty intense cooling solutions to get heat off the surface of a comparatively thinner chip. If chips become more cubic how would we cool the inside?
CPU dies are optimised towards being cooled from one side. I wonder if we'll eventually see sockets, motherboards and heat spreaders shift towards cooling both sides of the CPU.
Probably not, can't imagine what a halfway feasible solution to integrating pin out and a heat spreader would be.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-exploring-on-chip-sem...
That would only double cooling capacity, and has costs - completely invalidates current motherboard designs.
1) DRAM gets integrated with the cpu. Slight thickness increase, probably quite a bit of added width. We get a bigger area to cool, closer ram and no need for any memory pins.
2) Add power connections to the 2 cooling sides. Running power wires through the coolers shouldn't be an issue.
3) Run as many of the fastest PCIe lanes as you can out the 4 thin sides of the package. These end up handling ALL of the IO.
Some downsides I can think of off the bat are cooking the ram chips and with so much density and heat not sure how well signal integrity would work out.