How Chip Stacking Boosts Laptops

For decades, the size and density of a computer chip’s electrical circuitry served as a litmus test. Intel now feels that another dimension is as important: how skillfully a bunch of such processors can be bundled into a single, more powerful CPU.

‘Chip Stacking’

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger will highlight the company’s packaging capabilities at the Hot Chips conference. It’s an important component of two new processors: Meteor Lake, a next-generation Core processor family member that will power PCs in 2023, and Ponte Vecchio, the brains of Aurora, the world’s fastest supercomputer.

Advanced packaging, which allows chip designers to combine several “chiplets” into a single bigger CPU, will be critical in making future PCs quicker and more powerful. The technique is used by AMD to produce their top-tier PC CPU, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and by Apple to integrate two M1 Max processors into the M1 Ultra, the company’s most powerful Mac processor which have made the Macs faster at various levels including something as trivial as bulk music transfers and any type of data sharing.

However, that Ryzen CPU costs $440, and the M1 Ultra costs $2,000 more than an M1 Max Mac Studio. Meteor Lake introduces packaging to the mainstream PC industry, where customers purchase hundreds of millions of PCs each year, even in poor years. The development will result in quicker, more powerful computers at a lower cost.

Staying on the leading edge of chip technology required miniaturizing chip circuits for decades. Photolithography is a method used by chipmakers to etch small on-off switches called transistors onto silicon wafers using light patterns. The smaller the transistors, the more designers may add for new features like as graphics accelerators or artificial intelligence tasks. Intel now expects that combining these chiplets into a package will provide the same processing power improvement as standard photolithography.

Intel is concerned in packaging technologies. It is battling to restore chipmaking primacy from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), which manufactures Apple chips, and Samsung. Despite spending tens of billions of dollars on additional chip manufacturing capacity, its most recent quarterly financial results were “disastrous”. The US government’s $52.7 billion chipmaking subsidies will not assist until 2023. Packaging might assist Intel in regaining some of its former edge.

Expected Advantages

The ability of a chip designer to mix and match processing components is a significant benefit of packing chiplets. The most performance-sensitive chiplets can be manufactured using the most recent generation manufacturing method, which is a premium alternative, while less crucial sections may be built using older, less expensive technologies and chiplets that have previously proven themselves.

Chiplets also help Intel’s production issues. TSMC manufactures three of Meteor Lake’s four data-processing chiplets. Intel created all of the components but will only manufacture the chiplet with the CPU cores. Chiplets can also help chip designers adopt new manufacturing technologies more quickly. Rather of waiting for engineers to upgrade every kind of transistor for a more sophisticated photolithography technique, chipmakers may use the new process just for the most performance-critical chip jobs.

Because advanced packaging increases cost, complexity, and extra production procedures, it is not always the best option. It also does not address issues such as those that delayed Intel’s Sapphire Rapids and Ponte Vecchio. However, it will become more important to chips in almost every PC on the market.