Intel going chiplet?

[porina]

 

I don't follow the poster on twitter, but they have been known to leak stuff in the past. This looks like an Intel CPU, with 4 dies in it? In the linked video on bilibili you can also see the LGA on the opposite side. I haven't had a chance to take a closer look at it yet.

[Dissitesuxba11s]

If this is real, then we can only have thank AMD for pushing them forward. 

 

I don't know what core/thread count they plan to go up to but I wonder if they would have to go to a larger IHS akin to the one on the W-3175X.

 

[porina]

25 minutes ago, Dissitesuxba11s said:

If this is real, then we can only have thank AMD for pushing them forward. 

 

I don't know what core/thread count they plan to go up to but I wonder if they would have to go to a larger IHS akin to the one on the W-3175X.

There's a lot of unknowns for now.

 

We could estimate a size and compare to known products. I'll have to poke through the video later and estimate the pad count, and see if that aligns with anything else known or rumoured.

 

What could each of those 4 blocks be? Are they the same, or different function?

 

Could it be Foveros? While the 4 squares are similar, other images had different packaging so I'm not convinced that is the case. This looks more like traditional 4 dies on a substrate, and not any fancy stacking.

[porina]

Looking at the pads on the bottom, I count 1156. LGA1156... is ancient? In a quick comparison it looks to match placement of features to the old one, apart from the mystery CPU not having capacitors and stuff on the bottom. 1150/1151/1155 looks different. I vaguely recall Intel had "glued" dies together in the distant past, but I'm not aware of it on 1156. Anyone know different?

 

Ok, there's more comments in the tweet thread now. Apparently this was an old experimental CPU with 8 cores in it. Nothing new  

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 hour ago, Dissitesuxba11s said:

If this is real, then we can only have thank AMD for pushing them forward.

What AMD is doing isn't anything new. "Chiplet" just appears to be a buzzword for multi-chip module packaging. Intel has done this before with the Pentium D Smithfield and Core 2 Quad. The only thing I'm seeing AMD doing differently here is de-intregrating the chipset features of the CPU and putting it back on its own die, then including that with the processor package.

 

Monolithic design still has its perks, so if the engineers think they can make it work while mitigating the issues that come with it, then it's a design that works for them. Heck, AMD's design with Zen 2 has potential logistical headaches over Zen 1 because they now have to worry about stocking two things rather than one.