Modern processors are made up of billions of tiny transistors, and constantly shrinking them allows chip makers to keep up with Moore’s Law. But what if the processors themselves get smaller? This is exactly the vision behind chipsets: the idea of assembling smaller processor components that take some of the CPU’s load and can be designed as chips themselves…
Semiconductor industry giants, including TSMC and Arm, have teamed up to design a new universal chip interface that they hope will accelerate chip chip innovation in the future, and they’ve announced they’ve formed a new consortium to that end.
The new consortium is called Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) and its goal is to standardize die-to-die interconnects for future chipset designs with an open source approach that any industry player can use.
It is noteworthy that Nvidia is not in the consortium. However, this shortcoming may not be so significant, as all three of the world’s leading semiconductor giants (Intel, TSMC and Samsung) are participating.
What this means for processor design is ultimately up to the engineers. But it looks like this will allow for better integration of chips, which are smaller processor components that take some of the load off the central processing cores.
Part of UCIe’s appeal is that it gives the industry more flexibility in processor design, allowing it to interface with other components on a motherboard via PCIe and other connections.
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