AMD says chiplet design can cut costs by more than half

Latest update time：2021-08-31 16:10

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AMD has long been ahead of Intel in cost per core, but did AMD really need to pursue chip design to make Zen 2 so affordable? A new slide from a recent ISSCC presentation shows just how much money the company has saved, and the results are pretty impressive.

AMD has consistently lagged Intel from a dollar-per-core perspective ever since the Zen architecture was introduced. AMD's value-oriented approach can be attributed to many factors, but none more relevant than the novel "chiplet" design AMD is using in making its latest Zen 2 chips. The idea is to take several smaller dies made on different processes and combine them on a single package to increase yields and, therefore, reduce costs. But by how much? In some cases by more than half.

AMD revealed in its latest presentation at ISSCC (International Solid-State Circuits Conference) that manufacturing a 16-core single chip (such as the Ryzen 9 3950X) on TSMC's 7nm process costs more than twice as much as a multi-die CPU. As you can imagine, the fewer the core count, the less savings there are, but even on the low-end of what AMD showed off, an 8-core CPU on a 7nm CPU die and 14nm I/O die can reduce costs by about 25%.

Intel moved in the direction of chiplets with the announcement of its stacked Foveros design in 2018. While Zen 2 has yet to be released in laptops, the 4000 series has been confirmed to use the latest architecture, and information is emerging more and more frequently. It’s worth noting that these laptop CPUs do not use a chiplet design, so it will be interesting to see how these monolithic variants correspond with chiplets again.

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