Video Future AMD processors could feature domain-specific accelerators – even some created by third parties, according to senior execs at the chip

Standardization could open door to third-party chiplets in AMD designs

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2024-03-29 16:00:12

Video Future AMD processors could feature domain-specific accelerators – even some created by third parties, according to senior execs at the chip shop.

Speaking with AMD CTO Mark Papermaster in a video released Wednesday, senior vice president Sam Naffziger stressed the importance of chiplet standardization. You can watch all 25 minutes below.

"Domain-specific accelerators, that's the best way to have the best performance per watt per dollar. So it is absolutely essential to progress. You can't afford to do a specific product for each one of these domains, so what we can do is have a chiplet ecosystem – a library essentially," Naffziger explained.

He was referring to Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) – an open standard for chiplet communications that, since its creation in early 2022, has won wide support from key industry players including AMD, Arm, Intel, and Nvidia, and many other smaller names too.

AMD has been at the forefront of chiplet architectures since the launch of its first-gen Ryzen and Epyc processors in 2017. Since then, the House of Zen's chiplet library has evolved to include multiple compute, I/O, and graphics dies, which it combines and packages in its consumer and datacenter processors.