Intel has shown a Meteor Lake laptop processor with on-package Lpddr5x memory. The company did so in a demonstration of its advanced packaging techniques Foveros and Emib.
The demonstration video shows Samsung’s two Lpddr5x-7500 dies with a total capacity of 16GB placed on the Foveros packaging of the four Meteor Lake chips. Placing the memory on the package along with the processor should improve the performance of the CPU. Although the exact configuration of the processor is not known, according to Tom’s Hardware, this could yield a peak bandwidth of 120GB/s. That’s more than the peak of the DDR5-5200 and Lpddr5-6400. It also allows the portable Meteor Lake devices to be more compact and thin.
On the other hand, this also means that if the memory chip goes bad, the entire CPU may fail, writes Tom’s Hardware. It also requires a more complex cooling system, as both the processor and memory must be cooled. Whether Meteor Lake products with such on-package LPddr5x memory will actually appear on the market is unclear. The Meteor Lake laptop processors will be officially unveiled this month.
Incidentally, Apple has been using on-package-Lpddr for its M1 and M2 chips for some time. Intel has also used package-on-package technology for its dram memory with its Atom CPUs for thin laptops and tablets for some time, and recently the company used in-package-dram for its hybrid Lakefield processor.
