New I wonder, has the cooling issue for 3D stacked ASICs been solved?
I don't think it has been resolved yet, if so I think the industry would be leaning hard in this direction.
I guess to quote Elon Musk, there are few things that are inevitable the rest is just possibility. By doing certain actions you can increase the probability of the outcome.
I think looking at this, 3D stacking is one possibility, on a similar vein multichip solutions is another solution (2x APU). Separation of CPU and GPU is another. Perhaps the inclusion of different accelerators.
I think at best 7nm will get APUs to about 12TF GPU performance. And that will take 2-3 years from now to happen at a price point that will be reasonable.
If that isn't enough then 2x that APU would be ~24TF. But the price point may not make any sense and heating and power becomes an issue.
Separation of CPU and GPU you run into a similar problems as multi-APU solutions.
3D stacking has its issues as well, and what would you 3D stack? GPU on top of GPU? CPU on top of GPU?
None of these issues have been solved yet, and from what I can see there is no clear front runner either.
When I look at what MS is doing with DX12 I lean towards multi GPU. Explicit and Implicit GPU support is there, Asynchronous and execute indirect supports multiGPU. So you can have execute indirect draw a scene on 1 GPU and after it's complete have it trigger he other GPU to do post processing for instance without CPU intervention.
So for me I see a software stack that supports a Big/Small model, or a big/big model etc.
If I were to not get too ahead of myself some form of multichip is likely to be the next generation if 12TF is not enough, otherwise 12TF will be next generation.