Chipmaker AMD has hinted that new transistor technology will keep Moore's Law alive for the next six to eight years, but as one might guess, it will cost more.
Rakers asked about the Zen family and its chiplet-based architecture versus the monolithic architecture seen with Intel's CPUs, and whether this would continue to serve AMD for the next four to five years, or whether another novel approach might be needed. "So, we're going to have innovations in transistor technology. We're going to have more density. We're going to have lower power, but it's going to cost more. So how you put solutions together has to change," he said.architecture, according to Papermaster, which enabled the modular approach of the chiplet architecture that sees a chip built from multiple dies, possibly manufactured using different process nodes, linked together using a standardized interconnect.
What this means is that the future will be heterogeneous, according to Papermaster, although we have already gone down this route at a system level if you look at the way CPUs and GPUs are paired together to accelerate certain workloads. Meanwhile, hyperscale cloud customers are increasingly asking for platforms optimized for key workloads, especially around performance and power efficiency, and this has been shaping AMD's development, according to Papermaster., he claimed it gives a total cost of ownership advantage for customers, and delivers it in a timely way.