Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “A CPU From AMD…AND Intel?! (UCIe Explained)”.
Imagine you could build a cpu in much the same way that we build pcs today with parts from different manufacturers. This might actually become a reality in the near future. Thanks to a new standard called ucie, that’s being pushed by a lot of major players in the tech industry, uci stands for universal chiplet interconnect express and it sounds a bit like pci express right. Funnily enough. It’S conceptually similar instead of adding to your computer’s functionality with cards that fit into slots. Ucie builds on a chips functionality with additional chip, lits as an example ucie might allow for a system on ship that has an intel, cpu, graphics from amd and a wi-fi radio from qualcomm, a security enclave from microsoft and an ai accelerator from google. We did see something like this in 2018, when intel came out with those kaby lake g processors, that featured amd graphics, but ucie takes this concept further and also standardizes it.
That’S the important part but hold on systems on a chip are already a thing. So, what’s the point of this modular approach? Well, most current socs are designed as a single monolithic chip, which presents some manufacturing disadvantages. You see transistors have gotten much smaller, which makes our chips perform better and consume less power, but, as we start hitting the limits of how small we can make them, the obvious way to continue improving performance is to make the chips bigger. But doing this raises the chances of a manufacturing defect, one little tiny defect that will render the entire thing useless.
So, instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water, the industry is moving towards smaller chiplets that can be combined after they’re manufactured. Moreover, ucie enables chiplets from different companies to be combined another key difference from how chiplets are usually put together. You can even combine different chiplets that use different process nodes onto the same package, believe it or not. Wireless chips for things like wi-fi and 5g actually perform better with larger transistors, because there isn’t as much signal leakage.
So you could combine a modem built on a larger node with a processor built on a smaller one. This opens the floodgates for companies to make different kinds of specialized chips, a relatively low cost, without having to design them from scratch, meaning it could be easier and cheaper in the end to get a phone with better ai for photo, editing and voice transcription, for example. Instead of like, we have right now where we are relying on the apples of the world to make one chip to rule them all, but how exactly does ucie help chips from different companies talk to each other? How does the standard work we’ll tell you right after we thank grammarly for sponsoring this video grammarly is an all-in-one writing tool that helps you with grammar and spelling suggestions, simply install the free desktop, app log in and start typing baby there’s also grammarly premium, which provides More in-depth feedback on your writing check out the tone, transformation and clarity tools. They help you by rewording sentences to make you sound more confident and by removing unnecessary jargon to help you get your point across more clearly go to grammarly.com techwiki to sign up for a free account and get 20 off grammarly premium today, right now, this instant. Do it all right, let’s talk about how these chiplets would communicate. You know how we compared ucie to pcie earlier in the video ucie can actually use pci express to move data between chiplets much the same way. An nvidia graphics card can talk with an intel. Cpu ucie can also use another protocol called compute express, link or cxl, which is basically a higher performance, pcie variant for data centers, but because ucie is designed primarily for chiplets that sit right next to each other. It’S much lower latency than a typical pci express implementation, and it can also move plenty of data. We’Re talking 1.3 terabytes per second through one millimeter of chip edge.
That quick communication means that ucie chips could combine features that would otherwise need to be on separate chips or even separate cards, while using a lot less power. But it’s not quite the same thing as amd’s infinity fabric or apple’s ultra fusion used in the m1 ultra. As directly connecting cpu cores like those do, requires more complex designs and keep in mind that ucie is a very new standard. So don’t expect to see tons of pcs and phones and servers that could be rocking it immediately, but it could end up being quite a big deal down the line as industry heavy hitters like intel amd arm, google, microsoft, meta, samsung, qualcomm and tsmc have all thrown Their weight behind the standard and keep an eye on apple and nvidia apple has moved toward designing their own arm-based silicone in-house, while nvidia continues to favor monolithic chips, but maybe we’ll see them jump on the uci train in the future. If it does end up becoming a ubiquitous industry standard in the meantime, i think i’ll design, my own phone chip with two 5g modems. So then it’ll be 10g. That’S how it works. 25G, thanks for watching guys, if you like this video hit like hit, subscribe and hit us up in the comments section with your ideas for subjects that you want to see us cover in the future.
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