Intel continues to work on an overall chip that has a lot of supporting hardware on board in addition to the CPU. Soon Meteor Lake chips can be built on top of it with LPDDRX The.

Intel shows great advances in its processor packaging technology. This makes it possible to combine the CPU with mobile memory for Meteor Lake. This allows for more compact computers and also brings better performance since the memory is literally closer to the CPU.

For the sake of clarity: The packaging technology in this context has nothing to do with the packaging in which a processor is placed. Packaging is the designation for an important step in the development of a processor, in which individual chips are combined with other circuitry into a usable component, ready for integration into a laptop or desktop.

modular chip

Intel shows it’s capable of packing 16GB of Samsung LPDDR5X memory into the overall package for Meteor Lake. Meteor Lake uses chiplet technology and is architecturally suited to combining different modules into one. In this form, the memory can provide a bandwidth of 120 GB/s, which is significantly higher than in a classic configuration where the memory is connected separately.

It’s the first time Intel has combined memory and CPU on one high-end (core) chip. Intel has been building combinations for lighter Atom chips for years. Apple does it too with its M chips. Performance and simplicity are the big advantages, but there are also disadvantages to the approach. For example, storage is not expandable or swappable in this way. If you need more RAM or if the RAM fails, your entire system is down. In terms of circularity and repairability, on-chip memory is therefore a step backwards.

Meteor Lake is the fourteenth generation of Intel Core. Intel will most likely officially launch the processors later this year. With the chips, Intel is introducing a new naming strategy in which the “i” disappears from the Core i.