HOT CHIPS Day 1: Hot Chiplets
I've said before that HOT CHIPS is one of the best places to absorb the zeitgeist of what is going on in the most advanced chip designs. After all, at HOT CHIPS, the presentations are about?many?of the most advanced designs in any given year. For example, a couple of years ago it became obvious that chiplets or systems-in-package were going mainstream, at least for high-performance designs. I wrote about that in my post?HOT CHIPS: Chipletifying Designs.
Today's post takes a 2022 look at what is going on in the technologies for putting more than one die in a package. I'm just going to use the name "chiplets" for this (Intel calls them "tiles") since all the terminology hasn't completely settled down yet. So here's the chiplet view of HOT CHIPS 2022's program.
Several of the presenters quoted Gordon Moore from his original paper in Electronics, the one that proposed what came to be known as Moore's Law. Later, on page 3, he said:
It may prove to be more economical to build large systems out of smaller functions, which are separately packaged and interconnected.
If there was a theme to this years HOT CHIPS, I think that would have to be it.
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NVIDIA’s Hopper GPU: Scaling Performance
The first presentation of the conference was by NVIDIA talking about their Hopper GPU (as in Grace Hopper, see my post?Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing?if you don't know who she was). This is also known as the H100. The presentation was by?Jack Choquette & Ronny Krashinsky.
The chip has 80B transistors and so is one of the largest monolithic chips...so no chiplet angle, right? Not so fast, it has the world's first HBM3 interface and so is designed to be packaged with HBM3 memory stacks. It is designed to have 5 stacks and a memory bandwidth of 3 TB/s (although the photos seem to show 6 sites).
AMD Instinct?MI200 Series Accelerator and Node Architectures
This was presented by?Alan Smith and Norman James. The first level of chiplets in this design is that it consists of two die joined together with a 500 GB/s in-package infinity fabric.