A chip design with 40 GPUs: Engineers plan to use “silicon interconnect fabric” to put 40 GPUs on a single wafer - [News]
Samuel K. Moore · IEEE Spectrum · 2019
Back in the 1980s, parallel-computing pioneer Gene Amdahl hatched a plan to speed mainframe computing: a silicon-wafer-size processor. By keeping most of the movement of data on the processor itself, computing would be faster and more energy efficient. With US $230 million from venture capitalists, the most ever at the time, Amdahl founded Trilogy Systems to make his vision a reality. This first commercial attempt at “wafer-scale integration” was such a disaster that it reportedly introduced the verb “to crater” into the financial press lexicon. Engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and at the University of California, Los Angeles, think it's time for another go.