Future of CPU design pixellated

INTEL'S TERASCALE projects are quite impressive, and what matters the most - they aren't in a fancy-schmancy concept phase usually described in Powerpointless presentations promising the Second Coming and so on - but rather offer real, working silicon.

In our talks with Intel researchers, we learned that the second goal of Tera Scale Computing is to get an SRAM die stacked on top of a multi-core Tera Scale die for massive amount of bandwidth, and keeping the chip size in order, or more importantly - skipping the increase of the package size, which could limit the final working clock of the product.

In the car industry, the chassis is "wedded" to the engine. In IT terms, we cannot figure a better term for joining two slivers of silicon together in holy matrimony, till death or electro-migration tear them apart. Romantic, isn't it?

The ingenious part is what kind of connection will be used for this wedding of silicon - classical ball arrangement, that is used on to combine silicon and packaging of today, just like Conroe, Kentsfield or just about any of your regular FC-PGA chips out there. Both silicons will be englazed in same amount of protective plastics, and tucked beneath the IHS (Integrated Heat Spreader).

So, without further ado, here's a wafer that features insane amount of SRAM memory and has Polaris (80-core) stuck next to it. In the near future, these two would be cut and placed one above the other.

Yours truly holding a 12-inch wafer with something that could become the future of CPU packaging

...and now, time for a close-up. Mirroring of this wafer thanks to colorful surrounding, made this picture incredibly hard to take, but stil...

Numero Uno is Polaris, the 80-core concept. Numero Due is SRAM Cache memory, all neatly produced at the same wafer. Only difference between this concept and the conventional CPU manufacturing is the fact that these two would not live one beside each other, but rather one on top of another.

The future? SDRAM, Flash memory… we can envision how small would portable MP3 or video players look like if chip stacking became a standard in the storage business. µ