Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company suspended shipments to China-based chip designer Sophgo after a chip it made was found on a Huawei AI processor, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Sophgo had ordered chips from TSMC that matched the one found on Huawei’s Ascend 910B, the people said. Huawei is restricted from buying the technology to protect U.S. national security. Reuters could not determine how the chip ended up on the Huawei product.
Tech research firm TechInsights discovered the TSMC chip on Huawei’s Ascend 910B when it took apart the multi-chip processor, a different source told Reuters on Tuesday. Alerted to the finding, about two weeks ago TSMC notified the U.S., the source said.
That is not very friendly.
Anyway, here’s a picture of what I believe is a multi-chip processor.
That’s something else entirely. It literally even says “chiplet” at the top. It is a collection of discrete processor chips.
These have existed before the term “chiplet”.
I know that SIP isn’t anything new, but it’s still not what “processor” brings to mind. It’s a package or a module, and it could comprise one or more processors.
Yes yes, you can name your purified thinking-sand however you like, but at least in layman’s terms, a processor can also be read as the combination package, rather than the specific onboard logic, or discrete silicon aboard it.
So the pedantry is that the whole package can’t be called a processor. A CPU is not a processor.