It seems that Apple has stored a carefully-guarded mystery about its new M1 Max silicon. New pics of the underside of the chip expose that it may basically have an interconnect bus that enables Multi-Chip-Module (MCM) scaling, allowing for the corporation to stack together various dies in a chiplet-dependent layout. That could consequence in chips with as lots of as 40 CPU cores and 128 GPU cores. Apple has however to affirm provisions for chiplet-primarily based styles, but the M1 Max could theoretically scale into an “M1 Max Duo” or even an “M1 Max Quadra” configuration, aligning with persistent studies of several chiplet-primarily based M1 patterns in the potential. 

Apple has managed to impress the world not once but 2 times already with the general performance of its Arm-centered M1 CPUs. The firm’s most current M1 Max chip is a power to be reckoned with by alone – the chips’ gargantuan 57 billion transistors permit Apple to scale up to 10 CPU cores and both 24 or 32 GPU cores (depending on the configuration you get), all in a solitary 5nm chip. Including lodging for a chiplet-based structure would theoretically multiply compute methods, and so functionality. 

The interconnect bus would make it possible for Apple to scale its chips by “gluing collectively” the correct number of M1 Max chips. But, of study course, it is really not only a issue of flipping 1 M1 Max chip and aligning it with the 2nd 1 Apple would even now have to use specific interposer and packaging solutions for a chiplet-dependent style.

Curiously, Apple’s M1 Pro chip (which fits in between the M1 and M1 Max SoCs) lacks the interconnect bus — it is really basically situated in the extended 50 % of the M1 Max (a beefier model of the M1 Pro). This probable suggests that Apple only expects users that need the supplemental graphics compute electric power in its M1 Max (these as graphics or tv studios) to call for even more efficiency scaling by way of this chiplet style philosophy. 

Marrying two 520 mm^2 Apple M1 Max dies in an “M1 Max Duo” chip could supply up to 20 CPU cores and 48 or 64 GPU models. It would also need an acceptable doubling of the system’s memory to 128 GB. Memory bandwidth should really also scale in these types of a process, up to 800 Gb/s. That seems doable within just the existing M1 Max style and design, though the 10,040 mm^2 of Apple silicon would be far more high-priced, of program.

Heading for the “M1 Max Quadra” resolution with 40 CPU cores and 128 GPU cores would be even more difficult. Most likely an added I/O die, as the resource indicates, is the suitable resolution, but options abound. Apple could also sustain plenty of inter-die bandwidth by means of an I/O technological innovation akin to AMD’s Infinity Cloth. No matter if or not the more substantial chips would require an I/O die stays an open up question, as other leaks have instructed the layout will be expanded in a monolithic style and design.