Overview
Instead of building one massive 'monolithic' chip, the chiplet approach breaks the design into smaller pieces. These pieces can be manufactured on different process nodes and then connected using high-speed interconnects.
Advantages
- Higher Yield: Smaller chips are less likely to have defects than one giant chip.
- Cost Efficiency: Only the most critical parts (like CPU cores) need to use the most expensive, cutting-edge nodes.
- Flexibility: Allows for easy mixing and matching of different components (e.g., different numbers of cores or specialized accelerators).
Examples
- AMD Ryzen/EPYC: Uses a central I/O die connected to multiple 'Core Complex Dies' (CCDs).
- Intel Meteor Lake: Uses a 'tiled' architecture with separate compute, graphics, and I/O tiles.