AMD Demonstrates Stacked 3D V-Cache Technology: 192 MB at 2 TB/sec Although AMD has been willing to talk about the subject, the technology actually belongs to TSMC and can be used to make chips for anyone. Anandtech writes particularly lucid articles, and this one describes how TSMC has figured out how to add 3x the cache on an ordinary chip, by stacking on top of the cooler parts of the chip. An ordinary chip achieves microwave speeds, gigahertz, that would just radiate off the wires in your computer if they were not contained on the chip itself. The trick is to slow it down to speeds the wires and motherboard can handle, and just send more information all at once, in larger packages. The result is every processor chip has three types of cache, from slowest to fastest, and they've added all the slow cache on top of the processor, saving as much as a third of the space on a chip. The real interesting part, is that they've done it dirt cheap. They just make the chips, stack them, and sand down the copper top flat, for good thermals. Using other materials, they might even increase the thermals, but its the stupid shit that always gets you, and this is "Good Stupid" for consumers. Rather than replacing every kind of chip out there, this technology leverages the cheap price of old chip nodes, stacked on top of each other. Underneath the extra memory, should be the memory controller and analog circuitry such as AVX instructions that are more efficient and not power hogs, and that's where you could also put any analog circuitry for something like a gpu.
I was talking computer earlier... For example GBoard (google's app for texting on your phone - the QWERTY keyboard that comes up whether you are typing SMS or sending email in an app. This is the keyboard that is pre-installed with Android devices - maybe even iOS, I don't know because I don't do iPhone, but I know some of you probably do. Anyway, the thing is buggy/needs AMD! I use it all the time because it's soooo much better than trying to thumb around the tiny keyboard. And I use it to translate into Russian - which is like multiple times per day (my fiance speaks Russian, and less so English, as well as other languages - she said something in Spanish once, and I'm going, "WHAT???!!!" lol). It doubles up letters frequently such that an error is contributed to the dictated text. Well, this doesn't effect English messages as much as it ruins translations... But I tried other apps to replace GBoard and found they were not the same. The Microsoft one (SwiftKey) does voice to text, but doesn't automatically translate - you need to long-press, cut, and paste into the translation feature. Well, that's inconvenient. Several others from third-party unknowns are similar to SwiftKey, not having the translate built-in. I concluded that it might be intellectual property or a trademark/patent issue. But I emailed the developer and sure as shinola the first thing I said into the email message exhibited the error! ~ "Hhello". Okay... I hope they fix it - it's really annoying. But I digress... More to the OP, the computer industry is the mainstay of CoViD-19 stay-at-home restriction. They are advancing rapidly and my head spins to see the world change so quickly. Kudos to them for inventing a cooler chip - maybe it will speed things up.
