The future of amd with chiplet processors and 3d memories

AMD's latest slide pack reveals a lot about the company's future plans, from its Chiplet design to three-dimensional memories.

AMD Reveals Its Plans With Chiplet Processors And 3D Memories

At the HPC Rice Oil and Gas Conference, AMD's Forrest Norrod hosted a talk titled “Evolving System Design for HPC: Next Generation CPU and Accelerator Technologies '' in which he discussed AMD's future hardware design with multiple slides interesting.

In this talk, Norrod explained why the multichip approach was necessary with EPYC and why his Chiplet-based approach is the way to go with his second generation EPYC processors. A brief reference to 3D memory technologies was also made, pointing to a technology that seems to go beyond HBM2.

AMD comments that transitions to smaller nodes is not enough to create chips with more transistors and higher performance. The industry needed a way to scale products to deliver higher performance while achieving high silicon yields and low product prices. This is where AMD's Multi-Chip-Module (MCM) designs come in. They allow the company's first-generation EPYC processors to scale to 32 cores and 64 threads, using four interconnected 8-core processors.

As the slide shows, the next step will be processors with a Chiplet design, an evolution of MCM. In this way, AMD's second generation EPYC and third generation Ryzen products will offer greater scaling and allow each piece of silicon to be optimized to offer the best latency and power characteristics.

"Innovation in memory"

Perhaps the most exciting part of AMD's slides is its "memory innovation, " which explicitly mentions "On-Die 3D Stacked Memory." This feature is "in development" and shouldn't be expected in any upcoming release, but it does point to a future where AMD has truly three-dimensional chip designs. AMD may be designing a low-latency memory type similar to Intel's Forveros.

CCIX and GenZ support

On the next slide, AMD claims that CCIX and GenZ support will "be here soon, " hinting (but not confirming) that the company's Zen 2 products will support these new interconnectivity standards.

Intel announced its CXL connectivity standard earlier this week, but it looks like AMD will move from it in favor of CCIX and GenZ.

In mid-2019, AMD plans to launch its EPYC “ROME” series processors, the world's first 7nm CPU for data centers, said to offer twice the performance per sokcet. In addition, the arrival of the third generation Ryzen and Navi-based graphics cards is also expected.

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