Intel is gearing up to ramp up its processors with a chiplet design. At a time when chiplets offer improved performance and considerably reduce development time and costs, Intel is on the cusp of a big change. As part of the ongoing Intel Tech Tour, Suresh Kumar Dass, General Manager of Intel Malaysia, sat down with indianexpress.com for an exclusive chat. "Monolithic was the thing to do a few years ago, as breaking a signal out of a chip would incur a power penalty. Now, with advanced chiplet design, Intel can mix and match chips to keep Moore's law relevant,” Dass said while throwing light on the chip maker’s vision. According to Moore’s Law, named after Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore, the number of transistors in an IC (integrated circuit) doubles almost every two years. This has been a trend in the microprocessors industry since 1970. With smaller transistors and advanced packaging solutions, Intel has been keeping Moore’s Law relevant for over five decades. When compared to a chiplet, the transfer speed, latency, and everything is quicker on a monolithic die. However, as the SoC (System-on-Chip) became more complex, "monolithic dies became giant dice," says Dass who is also the Vice-President, Design Engineering, at Intel Malaysia. A chiplet will have several dies with an ideal die size. This will decrease the percentage of bad dies per wafer, resulting in a higher yield percentage. With a single-die chip, there is a higher amount of defect density, especially with bigger dies. With IDM 2.0 (Integrated Device Manufacturing 2.0), Intel can mix and match, where a single system-on-chip can include a GPU based on a particular process technology, while the CPU could benefit from a more efficient manufacturing process. This will help Intel to design a processor that’s both efficient and cost-effective. When asked about heating issues pertaining to 3D stacking, Dass said, "It's a solvable one with a mixture of some innovative proprietary technology." It's not just Intel; almost every major chip-design brand currently opts for chipset-based processors rather than a monolithic chip. This indicates that Intel will likely incorporate chiplet design in its future products and solutions. Intel started to incorporate chiplet design almost a decade ago and the company’s Ponte Vecchio is currently the most complex chiplet. Similarly, contemporaries like AMD and Apple also make use of chiplet design to develop high-performance processors. The author is in Malaysia on the invite of Intel India
