Architectural exploration of Si-IF many-die processors
Daniel Petrisko · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 2018
Monolithic, single-die processors dominate today’s computing landscape. High performance systems achieve massive throughput by connecting large numbers of discrete chips – CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs – through high latency, low bandwidth interconnects. However, such systems provide limited performance scaling due to high communication costs between the discrete chips. This thesis proposes an alternate path for performance scaling: integrating many dies onto a single chip using a novel assembly technology – Silicon Interconnect Fabric (Si-IF). Many-die processors have both a technical and an economic advantage over their monolithic counterparts. We demonstrate potential benefits of a many-die approach using two approaches: efficient workload coverage design space exploration using many dies and evaluating a many-die wafer-scale GPU design.