A few months ago, we covered the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express UCIe 1.0 Launch. There has been a lot of movement in the consortium since then. Specifically, it has been incorporated and has added many new members. This is a big milestone in the new standard.
UCIe Consortium Incorporated and Adds NVIDIA and Alibaba
As a quick refresher, UCIe is Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express. UCIe is designed to standardize the way chiplets are constructed and communicate with one another. Think of UCIe as a foundational element for having SoC cross-packaging chiplets from different vendors and on different process nodes. When we discuss heterogeneous chiplet CPUs, this is one of the technologies that will need to happen.
UCIe has been taking off recently. With industry consortiums like UCIe, one of the biggest challenges is getting enough support that it becomes a single industry standard rather than many smaller standards that limit interoperability. Part of the lifecycle is that these consortiums, like CXL, need to be incorporated after inception and then hold the IP and working groups.
Also as part of the incorporated consortium, board members become part of the governance structure along with formal working groups. Alibaba and NVIDIA have joined as new board members. Looking at the working groups, we have a who’s who of major silicon providers and major hyperscalers.
The above list or when we see AMD, Arm, Intel, NVIDIA and more all get onboard with a standard, that is a good indication that the standard will thrive and is likely to become dominant.
Final Words
We have covered the OCP ODSA and projects like the recent OCP BoW interconnect specification. From the level of members and support, it feels like UCIe, although newer, has significantly more momentum as we talk to companies. The new incorporation and adding NVIDIA and Alibaba adds a new large silicon provider as well as a hyper-scaler/ silicon provider to the mix. Our sense is that eventually, OCP’s ODSA and its sub-projects are going to have to fold into UCIe just as the industry has moved to CXL.
This is so cool, it’s like watching the standards for motherboards that happened in the early 2000s, but for tiny chiplets. I’m thinking this could potentially evolve into a unified chiplet/processor socket to be used on actual motherboards as well. Being able to get a physical board and swap in a chiplet with either Intel, AMD, or Arm (or even mixed) processors without compatibility issue would be amazing.