Chip fabricator for just about every major hardware company out there, TSMC, has announced the debut of a brand new manufacturing technique that would let it stack processors laterally in a 3D configuration, much like 3D NAND has made it possible to do with memory products. This has the potential to usher in a new age of graphics chips which are stacked vertically, making for much more powerful graphics cards in a similarly small footprint.
Graphics cards with multiple cores on a single PCB aren't entirely unheard of before, but they are rare. They tend to be exceedingly powerful when done right, but they're expensive and take up a lot of room, because each core requires its own power and memory. With TSMC's new design, that wouldn't be the case.
Announced at the TSMC Technology Symposium this week in Santa Clara, the new Wafer on Wafer technique stacks chips on top of one another and connects them using "through silicon vias".This would kill off any latency problems associated with multi-core graphics cards and would even have the card appear as a single GPU to the system, making it far less complicated for developers, game designers and indeed gamers themselves, to utilize the full power of the GPUs.
The only problem with the Wafer on Wafer system, is that it effectively doubles the failure rate of designs as if even one chip is broken, the whole multi-core chip has to be thrown out. That means that TSMC is likely to leverage this system on established manufacturing processes. That could mean that future designs would use last-generation chips in a multi-core setup to extend the life of a line, as
Perhaps that will act as a good stop gap while yields for sub-10nm chips are improved over the next few years.
Imag source: iPhone Digital/Flickr
