Josh Norem
2023-12-11 07:00:00
www.extremetech.com
AMD was ahead of the rest of the industry in using chiplets instead of bulky monolithic dies in its CPU designs. That forward-looking approach also allowed it to build the industry’s first chiplet-based GPUs with the Radeon RX 7000 series. That may not have gone as well as the company liked as it couldn’t topple Nvidia’s RTX 4090, but it apparently hasn’t stopped the company from considering a chiplet-based GPU future. According to a new patent, the company is exploring new ways to use even more chiplets in a possible future GPU design.
The new patent (PDF) is dated November 23, 2023, so we’ll likely not see this for a while. It describes a GPU design radically different from its existing chiplet layout, which has a host of memory cache dies (MCD) spread around the large main GPU die, which it calls the Graphics Compute Die (GCD). The new patent suggests AMD is exploring making the GCD out of chiplets instead of just one giant slab of silicon at some point in the future. It describes a system that distributes a geometry workload across several chiplets, all working in parallel. Additionally, no “central chiplet” is distributing work to its subordinates, as they will all function independently.
It’s unclear how the chiplets would work independently without a central controller chip, but perhaps we’ll find out the answer in a few years.
Credit: AMD/USPTO
AMD’s patent seems to indicate where the industry is heading, as monolithic ties have begun to exceed the limitations of certain lithography technologies, and using chiplets allows for better yields and lower costs. Nvidia is also rumored to be moving to chiplets for its future data center GPUs, which are code-named Blackwell and are due in 2024. However, it is supposedly sticking to a monolithic design for its next-generation GeForce GPUs.
AMD might also be quite far along in its exploration of this concept. In August, a schematic of a future Radeon 8000-series GPU was leaked, showing an ambitious multi-chip module (MCM) design that had reportedly been scrapped due to its complexity and cost. That design featured 3D-stacking of nine Shader Engine Dies (SED) on top of three active interposers with a multimedia die connected to the middle interposer. The memory controller was also embedded in the multimedia die, which sat below the SEDs but on top of the package.
As TechSpot points out, chiplets are the future for CPUs, but it’s still too early to tell how chiplets will transform the GPU market. Intel is moving to “tiles” for its upcoming Meteor Lake CPUs, a first for the company. Still, there’s no indication it’ll be doing something similar on its upcoming GPUs, such as Battlemage and Celestial. Though AMD is spearheading this effort for GPUs, we’ll be curious to see if it changes its design when RDNA 4 GPUs debut in 2024.