The problem with that is that you can't do it by making straight chord slices of the the wafer - each cut has to terminate or it will go through the middle of the next hexagon. But it does sound plausible - surely lasers could do this more easily than retooling the whole lithography pipeline for rectangular wafers. But you'd think they would have thought of the idea.

You could do triangular chips with straight cuts. But I that would divide the area more finely, which is the opposite of what they need.

With chiplet based designs, how big are the individual chiplets? Would triangles make sense in that context?

(Asking from total ignorance)

It varies, if you look at meteor lake [1] the different die go from 27..100 sq mm

(Compared to the h200 which is an insane 814 sqmm)

But I don't see any obvious advantage to small triangular die. Once the die are small if doesn't make much difference vs rectangular as to how many you can pack into a circle (for a given die area), and rectangle are much more convenient

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Lake

If we're suggesting shapes can I suggest one on the surface of pipe that wraps back around on itself? So I can run coolant through the middle.

I mean. The idea sounds fun but doing photolithography on a pipe's surface sounds like absolute hell.

Hey, laser printers do it

That's fair enough.

Reminds me of Soviet nuclear reactor designs, where the fuel rods were hexagonal (instead of the square Western ones).

I would say never. Hex gives no advantage over round. Both have waste when dicing. Square gives the least amount of waste.

Squares tessellate better than hexagons so I have no idea what advantage hexagons could bring.

seems hard to dice

IO OR L4$ triangle tiles, main chip hexagons

It would only require double the cuts, right?

Look closely at a hexagonal lattice. There would be many small cuts as opposed to large straight lines.

Ah yeah I wasn't picturing it right in my head. I guess triangles could work, though.