Intel's latest advancement in chip-making is focused on packing the silicon together to create a lean, power-efficient PC.
On Wednesday, the company debuted a new manufacturing technology called "Foveros" that overhauls a PC's internal guts by fabricating the microprocessors on top of each other.
No longer does all the silicon need to be laid out on a flat board; space can be saved by bringing the chip manufacturing to the third-dimension and laying out one processor on another in stacks.
3D chip packaging tech is already used to cram memory chips together. But Intel said its latest manufacturing advancement can for the first time bring the 3D stacking to microprocessors such as CPUs, graphics chips, and AI processors.
The chip stacking can not only save on space, but also reduce power. One processor no longer needs to communicate with another over the long copper wires on the circuit board; instead the processors can be laid on top of each other, reducing the communication distance.
"It will enable the combination of world-class performance and power efficiency in a small form factor," Intel told PCMag in a statement.
The first devices built with the company's new Foveros process will arrive in the second half of 2019. Among the products will be a machine that features a chip using the company's upcoming 10-nanometer manufacturing process, and is combined with another low-power microprocessor fabricated with Intel's 22-nanometer technology.
Why hasn't Intel been using this tech before? Well, stacking a chip on top of another chip is harder than it looks. Processors produce heat, and so carelessly packing them together can cause the silicon to melt.
Creating the stacks without introducing manufacturing flaws has also been another challenge. Although chip packing has always been technically feasible, the technology required refinement to the point where it can churn out 3D stacked chips at a mass-market scale.
It appears Intel has cracked the code. The 3D chip stacking advancement follows another company effort to repackage the guts of a PC through Intel's Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) technology. Intel used this advancement to create a powerful, but small 2.5-pound machine in its Next Unit of Computing Line, dubbed Hades Canyon.
So far, Intel hasn't commented on whether the new Foveros manufacturing tech might have any limitations. It also isn't clear how many levels the microprocessors can be stacked. But as an example, Intel said PC makers will be able to use Foveros to lay an SRAM memory chip and power delivery circuits on a wafer, and then place other high-performance chips on top of them.