You may have heard the term chiplet, while looking for a new cpu to buy. To understand chiplet, you have understand how chips were designed before chiplet came about.
Earlier cpu chips were designed in a way that all integrated circuit required by the cpu chip were build on a single frame of cpu chip.
In simple terms, lets assume a cpu chip may perform four (4) functions, and every function will have a dedicated integrated circuit, hence all those four (4) integrated circuit for each function will be build on the chip at the time of manufacturing.
These are known as monolithic design. It is easy to manufacture, so companies provides thousands of cpu chips.
However with improvement in manufacturing and new technology, transistor size is continuing to decrease. This allows companies to manufacture cpu chips that are more powerful and efficient.
But with nano-meter size transistors, cpu chips continue to be manufactured on a single wafer disk ( its a single disk with multiple chips on it, that comes out of manufacturing in a single batch).
Since size is so small, it can contain some defects in some integrated circuit, which renders the whole cpu chip as waste or in some cases with reduced functionality.
To overcome and minimize waste, concept of chiplet is introduced.
Remember earlier we had four (4) dedicated integrated circuit on a single cpu chip, well now we separate these four (4) dedicated integrated circuit on different four (4) smaller chip.
We call these small chips as chiplets.
Further all dedicated small chips (chiplets) can be arranged on a cpu chip, to make complete functional cpu chip. So in case a single integrated circuit chiplet has defect, then only a single chiplet is wasted.
This also helps a single cpu chip to scale in terms of power or efficiency. Usually chiplet design can help increase core count of a cpu chip.
Concept of chiplet has been very efficient for companies to manufacture and slowly adopted by industry. It has also given manufacturers the ability to produce specialized cpu chip for different types of workloads in quicker time then ever.
Recently a new Chiplet Standard is accepted by Intel, AMD and Arm, know as Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe).
