UCIe Announced For Fostering An Open Chiplet Ecosystem

[phoronix]

Phoronix: UCIe Announced For Fostering An Open Chiplet Ecosystem

The Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) consortium was announced today for fostering an open chiplet ecosystem for future generations of hardware...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=UCIe-Chiplet-Ecosystem

[ms178]

Thinking of such a Frankenstein-SoC with IP from several different vendors, is this the end of single-vendor branded products? Under which brand do you sell it? In the OEM market, OEM-branded SoCs might be an easy route to circumvent this issue but in the DIY market, I wonder how they'll tackle this marketing problem.

[brucethemoose]

Thinking of such a Frankenstein-SoC with IP from several different vendors, is this the end of single-vendor branded products? Under which brand do you sell it? In the OEM market, OEM-branded SoCs might be an easy route to circumvent this issue but in the DIY market, I wonder how they'll tackle this marketing problem.

I think one still needs chip design chops to stitch everything together, so (for instance) Dell wouldn't be capable of mixing and matching blocks into a Frankenstein SoC by themselves.


But this does make it way, way cheaper to custom order stuff. Asus could, for instance, ask for custom Intel SKUs with more graphics tiles and faster embedded memory without breaking the bank, or perhaps some mega cloud vendor could ask Nvidia/AMD to integrate 3rd party accelerators onto GPU packages. Previously, you'd have to ask for a whole new die, which is quite possibly a 9 figure upfront investment.

[M@GOid]

Knowing that Intel loathes using any name created by AMD's marketing department, they must be doing their best not to call this thing "The Universal Tile Interconnect Express"...

[ms178]

I think one still needs chip design chops to stitch everything together, so (for instance) Dell wouldn't be capable of mixing and matching blocks into a Frankenstein SoC by themselves.

I see no problem in that case. Dell / HP / Lenovo can market these custom SoC designs as their own, from the marketing perspective that is the easiest segment to deal with.

But it is much harder in the DYI market with all of these entranched fanboys and their cheering for their sacred company, take the Intel CPU with Vega M Graphics for example. That was already a tough sell from a pure marketing standpoint as you had to sell Intel and AMD together in one product. Customers are used to single-vendor product lines and not multi-vendor product lines. With UCIe you can mix and match IP from even more vendors on a single package, e.g. Intel CPU tile, Nvidia GPU+AI tile plus a Qualcomm 5G modem. Do you break that down into its individual main pieces and attribute it to each company or do you market that as a distinctive new product line by the main contractor? And who is the main contractor? It is not a given that the CPU tile is the most valuable and therefore that the end product falls into the umbrella of that manufacturer?!

To stay with the example from above, what if there is a different version of the same SoC with an AMD GPU+AI tile instead?! Do you name that differently or keep it as a variant in the same product line, e.g. do we get Intel Xeon Geforce vs. Intel Xeon Radeon now? Also why should AMD and NVIDIA be okay with hiding their own main brand on such a product?

But this does make it way, way cheaper to custom order stuff. Asus could, for instance, ask for custom Intel SKUs with more graphics tiles and faster embedded memory without breaking the bank, or perhaps some mega cloud vendor could ask Nvidia/AMD to integrate 3rd party accelerators onto GPU packages. Previously, you'd have to ask for a whole new die, which is quite possibly a 9 figure upfront investment.

Youtubers talked about such full customization possibilities years ago - I am excited to see it happen, as we end users might see better tailored products for our use cases sooner and for less cost. Intel's latest announcements pointed clearly into this direction as well.

[brucethemoose]

I see no problem in that case. Dell / HP / Lenovo can market these custom SoC designs as their own, from the marketing perspective that is the easiest segment to deal with.

But it is much harder in the DYI market with all of these entranched fanboys and their cheering for their sacred company, take the Intel CPU with Vega M Graphics for example. That was already a tough sell from a pure marketing standpoint as you had to sell Intel and AMD together in one product. Customers are used to single-vendor product lines and not multi-vendor product lines. With UCIe you can mix and match IP from even more vendors on a single package, e.g. Intel CPU tile, Nvidia GPU+AI tile plus a Qualcomm 5G modem. Do you break that down into its individual main pieces and attribute it to each company or do you market that as a distinctive new product line by the main contractor? And who is the main contractor? It is not a given that the CPU tile is the most valuable and therefore that the end product falls into the umbrella of that manufacturer?!

To stay with the example from above, what if there is a different version of the same SoC with an AMD GPU+AI tile instead?! Do you name that differently or keep it as a variant in the same product line, e.g. do we get Intel Xeon Geforce vs. Intel Xeon Radeon now? Also why should AMD and NVIDIA be okay with hiding their own main brand on such a product?



Youtubers talked about such full customization possibilities years ago - I am excited to see it happen, as we end users might see better tailored products for our use cases sooner and for less cost. Intel's latest announcements pointed clearly into this direction as well.

Eh, I don't see a problem for OEMs. They'll market it the same way they do now: with stickers on the laptops and desktops, and mentions in the tech specs. From the perspective of the end user receiving the marketing, it doesn't really matter if the segmentation is on the mobo or in the package itself.


The DIY desktop part market could be trickier... but I'm not too worried about that either. They pay marketers a whole lot to figure it out.


This is definitely a very good scenario as far as all those YT predictions go. A standardized interface, based on PCIe and CXL, with many important founders... I'm not sure what more we could ask for.

[rmfx]

And what assh$le is missing and not teaming with the group…? as usual NVidia!