The Economics of Chiplets

By Kari-No-Sugata, mooreslawisdead.com

Introduction

In the past, it was common for PCs to have a separate chip called a northbridge on the motherboard. The northbridge had a direct connection to the processor and handled the main memory controller and primary I/O functions. To help improve performance, processor designers integrated the main memory controller and the primary I/O controller onto the processor and the northbridge disappeared from the motherboard. Like how the x87 floating-point coprocessor was eventually integrated in the processor, this is part of a long running trend to integrate more and more onto the main processor.

The I/O chiplet on current Zen processors is effectively a northbridge, except that it is integrated into the processor package rather than the motherboard. So why did AMD seemingly go backwards?

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