Broadcom has been silently working on what appears to be one of the largest processors ever made, with 12 stacks of HBM memory, making this mystery XPU a bigger beast than NVIDIA's just-announced Blackwell B200 AI GPU.
In some new photos posted to X by our friend Patrick Moorhead, founder of top-ranked, technology analyst and advisory firm Moor Insights and Strategy. He snapped a photo with Frank Ostojic, who runs Broadcom's custom silicon group, and their new third-gen XPU design from a large "consumer AI company". You can see the picture of the XPU above.
Broadcom's mysterious third-gen XPU design features 12 stacks of HBM memory, which makes it bigger than NVIDIA's new Blackwell B200 AI GPU that the company unveiled at GTC 2024 last week.
Moorhead posted: "Here is another fun one. The guy who's smiling (Frank Ostojic) runs @Broadcom's custom silicon group. He should be smiling as he announced that he has a third XPU design from a large "consumer AI company." To the right is a close up of the XPU. You can see the 2 compute units on the center and all the HBM to the left and right. A full up custom SoC with lots and lots of compute, HBM, very high speed intra chip connectivity and, as you'd expect, the highest performance external networking".
TSMC most likely made the new XPU for Broadcom, with a chiplet design of this size (near the reticle limit) is bonkers, and getting good yields is another challenge in itself, but it appears TSMC and Broadcom have pulled it off. Moorhead says that we can se the two compute units on the center of the XPU, while there's HBM flanking left and right. Impressive stuff from Broadcom, especially without the fanfare that NVIDIA drove home with its Blackwell GPU announcement.
