Among the groups with a presence at this year’s Flash Memory Summit is the UCIe Consortium, the recently formed group responsible for the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) standard. First unveiled back in March, the UCIe Consortium is looking to establish a universal standard for connecting chiplets in future chip designs, allowing chip builders to mix-and-match chiplets from different companies. At the time of the March announcement, the group was looking for additional members as it prepared to formally incorporate, and for FMS they’re offering a brief update on their progress.

First off, the group has now become officially incorporated. And while this is largely a matter of paperwork for the group, it’s none the less an important step as it properly establishes them as a formal consortium. Among other things, this has allowed the group to launch their work groups for developing future versions of the standard, as well as to offer initial intellectual property rights (IPR) protections for members.

More significant, however, is the makeup of the incorporated UCIe board. While UCIe was initially formed with 10 members – a veritable who’s who of many of the big players in the chip industry – there were a couple of notable absences. The incorporated board, in turn, has picked up two more members who have bowed to the peer (to peer) pressure: NVIDIA and Alibaba.

NVIDIA for its part has already previously announced that it would support UCIe in future products (even if it’s still pushing customers to use NVLink), so their addition to the board is not unexpected. Still, it brings on board what’s essentially the final major chip vendor, firmly establishing support for UCIe across all of the ecosystem’s big players. Meanwhile, like Meta and Google Cloud, Alibaba represents another hyperscaler joining the group, who will presumably be taking full advantage of UCIe in developing chips for their datacenters and cloud computing services.

Overall, according to the Consortium the group is now up to 60 members total. And they are still looking to add more through events like FMS as they roll on towards getting UCIe 1.0 implemented in production chiplets.

Source: UCIe Consortium

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  • Exotica - Thursday, August 4, 2022 - link

    https://www.uciexpress.org/membership

    Amd intel Qualcomm Samsung TSMC are members.
  • Exotica - Thursday, August 4, 2022 - link

    Arm as well.
  • Ggaky - Friday, August 5, 2022 - link

    Actually, Intel, AMD, Arm, Google and others set it up in the first place. nVIDIA and Amazon was out.
    https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/intel-a...
  • ballsystemlord - Thursday, August 4, 2022 - link

    Why alibaba? Aren't they a company that does online shopping? Isn't it monopolistic to go into chip making as well?
  • meacupla - Thursday, August 4, 2022 - link

    If I had to guess, it's for their alibaba cloud services, and maybe their IoT products.
  • erinadreno - Friday, August 5, 2022 - link

    Alibaba is like Amazon in China, literally. From e commerce to cloud service to custom ASIC. Wouldn't be surprised if it joins anything that Amazon was already in.
  • rpg1966 - Thursday, August 4, 2022 - link

    No. A company that does many things is not a monopoly.
  • AdrianBc - Wednesday, August 10, 2022 - link

    Alibaba has designed and it already has in production the server CPU with the highest throughput per socket, according to the SPECrate 2017 Integer benchmark.

    The Alibaba CPU, with 128 cores supporting the Armv9.0-A ISA and with DDR5 memory and PCIe 5, beats easily the current AMD Milan or Intel Ice Lake Server CPUs.

    Of course for floating-point tasks, the Intel/AMD CPUs would be faster and the future AMD Genoa, with 96 cores / 192 threads per socket is expected to be faster at any task, but until the Genoa launch Alibaba will keep the first place.

    Alibaba is also a computer cloud provider, so, like Amazon with Graviton 3, they design their own server CPUs. In the past they have also made the fastest RISC-V CPUs for that time, but they have switched to the ARM ISA now.
  • Lakados - Thursday, August 11, 2022 - link

    Alibaba is the worlds 3’rd largest cloud host provider and many of their servers are using their own custom ARM and Accelerator designs.
  • Pierce89 - Friday, August 19, 2022 - link

    Different Alibaba. This one is a cloud compute provider I believe.

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