AMD's History of Chip Sizes - or Why chiplets were overdue

[moinmoin]

IT journalist Hiroshige Goto of PC Watch writes a lot of insightful articles in Japanese. His following chart includes a good selection of chip sizes since AMD K6 from 1997 and showcases well how at the start of the current decade the traditional way of shrinks stopped working for AMD (a fate Intel still suffers from right now).



The Zen 2 chiplet to the far right looks like a joke compared to the historical development up to that point.

 

[StrangerGuy]

I wonder if AMD is able to put back the IMC back the CPU chiplet on future designs.

 

[jpiniero]

I wonder if AMD is able to put back the IMC back the CPU chiplet on future designs.

The future is active interposers, no need really.

 

[vorsgren]

That's darned impressive. The zen 2 chiplet is among the smallest chips amd ever produced. Just shows what you get when you go through a die shrink and move most of your uncore to a separate chip.

 

[ClockHound]

The Zen2 chiplet looks like a splatlet on the windshield of progress. I want some spatlets this month.

 

[Soulkeeper]

I'm amazed at just how low the idle power usage was on an old 40nm ontario laptop.
If I turned the screen off, it could idle at 9 watts for the entire laptop. Very similar die size to the current chiplets.

 

[moinmoin]

Some updates graphs:

 

[Arkaign]

That's darned impressive. The zen 2 chiplet is among the smallest chips amd ever produced. Just shows what you get when you go through a die shrink and move most of your uncore to a separate chip.

And no stinking gigantic integrated graphics lol. Realizing that many Intel K series use basically half the entire die/transistor budget or more for that is just asinine.