Chiplets are a sophisticated new wrinkle to the CPU market, they usually’re onerous for us normies to wrap our heads round. So who higher to elucidate chip tech than a potato knowledgeable? Frequent PCWorld visitor Dr. Ian Cutress, also known as TechTechPotato, joins Will Smith on the PCWorld YouTube channel to interrupt it down for us.

The first false impression to dispel is that chiplets are a brand new concept. In reality they’ve been round for many years — IBM was making them way back to the ’80s, albeit in six-figure {hardware} for industrial clients. The primary concept is you can separate features of a processor into completely different particular person chips for higher efficiency. “Like the McDLT,” says Will, “so the hot stays hot and the cool stays cool.”

Now chip makers like AMD and Intel are making use of this concept to the CPU itself, isolating disparate parts to completely different components of the die, like the much-vaunted NPUs which might be making every thing an “AI PC” this yr. The platonic ideal of this concept is an open standard, the place you possibly can have main compute cores from one firm with an built-in GPU from one other firm and a reminiscence controller from one other, all working harmoniously on a single customary.

That…isn’t what’s taking place. Instead AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and the remainder of the business are all providing compelling mixtures of chiplets on their very own requirements. These are rising efficiency, effectivity, and adaptability, however we’re nowhere close to the purpose the place a serious business participant can order a custom-designed processor to suit its wants.

And the engineering and manufacturing prices that go into this know-how, particularly layering chiplets in “3D” stacks, makes them each costly and gradual to iterate. Plus, firms aren’t precisely eager to share that costly growth with anybody else, so we’re seeing a number of proprietary closed partitions round these distinctive designs.

“Is Moore’s Law dead?” asks Will, invoking a frequent speaking level of the tech business.

“No,” counters Ian, “Don’t believe everything Jensen [Huang, Nvidia CEO] says.” We thought we’d reached bodily limits for processor innovation earlier than, and blown previous them each time. “If Moore’s Law wasn’t still a thing, the semiconductor industry would stall. And right now we’re in the fastest growing pace of the semiconductor industry we’ve ever had.”

For extra insights on the business from a number of the brightest minds in tech, you’ll want to subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube.