How We’ll Reach a 1 Trillion Transistor GPU

“In the era of AI, the capability of a system is directly proportional to the number of transistors integrated into that system. One of the main limitations is that lithographic chipmaking tools have been designed to make ICs of no more than about 800 square millimeters, what’s called the reticle limit. But we can now extend the size of the integrated system beyond lithography’s reticle limit. By attaching several chips onto a larger interposer—a piece of silicon into which interconnects are built—we can integrate a system that contains a much larger number of devices than what is possible on a single chip. For example, TSMC’s chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) technology can accommodate up to six reticle fields’ worth of compute chips, along with a dozen high-bandwidth-memory (HBM) chips.” (IEEE Spectrum)

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NASA’s snake robot is designed to search out life in the icy oceans of a Saturn moon. The snake robot form factor has existed for decades. In addition to the diversity it adds to the world of automation, the design has several pragmatic attributes. The first is redundancy, which allows for the system to keep chugging even after a module is damaged. The second is a body that makes it possible for the serpentine system to navigate tight spaces. (via NASA JPL/Cal-tech/TechCrunch)

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