Chiplets are a complicated new wrinkle to the CPU market, and they're hard for us to wrap our heads around. So who better to explain chip tech than a potato expert? Dr. Ian Cuttress, a frequent PCWorld guest. Also known as TechTechPotato.joins Will Smith on the PCWorld YouTube channel to break it down for us.

The first misconception to dispel is that chaplets are a new idea. In fact they've been around for decades—IBM was making them as late as the 80s, albeit in six-figure hardware for industrial users. The basic idea is that you can separate processor functions into different individual chips for better performance. “Like McDLT“So hot stays hot and cold stays cold,” says Will.

Now chipmakers like AMD and Intel are applying this idea to the CPU itself, separating different components into different parts of the die. Like many NPUs Who are making everything “AI PC” this year. gave The Platonic ideal of this concept is an open standard.where you can have a primary compute core from one company with an integrated GPU from another company and a memory controller from another company, all working in sync at the same standard.

This… it's not happening. Instead, AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and the rest of the industry are all offering great combinations of chips at their own standards. These are increasing performance, efficiency and flexibility, but we are nowhere near the point where a major industry player can order a processor custom-designed to meet their needs.

And the engineering and manufacturing costs that go into this technology, particularly the layering of chips in “3D” stacks, make them both expensive and slow to replicate. Also, companies aren't exactly keen to share this expensive development with anyone else, so we're seeing a lot of proprietary closed walls around these unique designs.

“Is Moore's Law Dead?” asks Will, invoking a frequent talking point of the tech industry.

“No,” Ian replied, “don't believe everything Jensen (Huang, Nvidia CEO) says.” We thought we'd reached the physical limits to processor innovation before, and exceeded them every time. “If Moore's Law wasn't still a thing, the semiconductor industry would grind to a halt. And right now we're growing the semiconductor industry at the fastest pace we've ever had.

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