@HPCpodcast: CXL News, the CHIPS Act, Chips and Nm and Chip ‘Sprawl’

We’ve heard so much about the CXL interconnect – including the recent announcement of CXL 3.0 – and components that are CXL-ready, that it may come as a surprise that CXL 1.1 “hosts” are only just now shipping. It’s a technology that could play a central role in the ever-more heterogenous, more memory-intensive systems of the future. And now, after several years of experimentation and various interconnect consortia, CXL is emerging as the standard for advanced functionality for fabric technologies.

Along with CXL we also discuss some of the details of the CHIPS and Science Act recently passed by Congress and signed by President Biden – including the somewhat surprising opposition, given the geopolitical implications of chip manufacturing,  the bill has encountered from some quarters. And we discuss recent articles from the Wall Street Journal on the tenacious hold, despite increasingly unreliable vendor claims, that nanometer measurements have on the microprocessor world. The Journal also wrote on the rise of chip “stacking” to the point where, as the Journal analogized, “if microchips were cities, the new, industrywide strategy for making them better could be summed up in one word: ‘sprawl.’”

You can find our podcasts at insideHPC’s @HPCpodcast page, on Twitter and at the OrionX.net blog. Here’s the RSS feed.

We welcome your ideas for special topics and guest commentators. Feel free to contact Doug Black or Shahin Khan with your suggestions.