back to article Intel shows how chiplets will form Meteor Lake CPUs

Intel has given more detail on how its upcoming Meteor Lake processors will be made from multiple chiplets, enabling it to mix and match to deliver different capabilities, and easing the introduction of its successor, Arrow Lake – which follows the same construction. At the Hot Chips conference, the chipmaker presented a …

  1. Mike 137 Silver badge

    "processors will be made from multiple chiplets"

    Right back full circle to the late '70s/early '80s. I have a wide fast A/D chip of that age (I forget the designation) which is constructed exactly like this - multiple small chips on a ceramic substrate, under an overall gold plated lid.

    1. elsergiovolador Silver badge

      Re: "processors will be made from multiple chiplets"

      They look somewhat beautiful. I have some of these on my shelf for decoration.

    2. Tomato42

      Re: "processors will be made from multiple chiplets"

      IBM z series mainframes CPUs also used chiplets on a ceramic substrate

  2. elsergiovolador Silver badge

    Hot Chips

    I wonder if you could install those chiplets underneath the floor tiles as an alternative for traditional floor heating?

    Can you imagine having your floor hot during the winter and knowing that it is computing hashes for your favourite crypto? It's much better than a floor heating that does nothing apart from emitting heat.

    Pat should really think about transforming Intel into heating systems company.

  3. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      A lot of IC hardware has a common base, and in the production process as they test various die, they'll find some are "better" than others. e.g. have some defects, etc, so they will correspondingly enable/disable various features, enable them to run at higher or lower clock rates and so forth.. See the concept of CPU Binning for a lot more detail articulated better than I can ramble about.

      Basically, the proliferation of CPU "types" is really tweaking and branding of CPUs that failed to reach the highest performance standards in initial testing.

      1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

        And yet, unless one spends weeks poring over CPU specs, there's very little clue about the relative speeds for a generic workload on, say, a laptop system. These days I tend to settle for 'laptops aimed at managers are always faster than they need to be' and the approach seems to work for my admittedly low expectations.

      2. Sgt_Oddball

        There's also...

        Fun to be had with these binned parts where you can buy a lower binned part and then push it to well beyond its intended performance bracket.

        Think AMD Phenom processors. I had a dual core black edition, forced the right setting and a very overclockable quad core (cooling permitting).

        Chiplets is just another way to package different performance parts together to create a new product and isn't the first time that Intel's cribbed an idea off AMD (though Intel are taking it a step beyond).

        Really it's all down to how good the interconnect fabric is in practice.

        1. ayay

          Re: There's also...

          As it stands, they're saying they will. They're not doing it.

          Yet?

  4. _olli

    The follower and the followee

    Funnily The Register dubbed AMD as "chimpzilla" back in old days when AMD used to mimic every move that Intel made... And how these roles have reversed, nowadays Intel repeating what they see AMD doing.

  5. Randy Hudson

    I don't think I'll be disaggregating any money for one of these.

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