A modern processor may contain compute from one foundry, memory from another and interconnect from a third, all bonded on a single substrate. Open packaging standards have made this a catalogue business, and smaller companies are assembling parts they could never have fabricated alone.
Winners and losers
Packaging houses and interconnect specialists are the new chokepoints. Monolithic die designers lose some advantage. For buyers, the upside is faster iteration and chips tailored to narrow workloads.
Key takeaways
- Open packaging standards enable multi-vendor dies
- Packaging capacity is the new constraint
- Niche processors become economical
This story is part of our ongoing coverage of hardware. We will update it as more details emerge.
