Quote:Rumors have been making the rounds about an as-of-yet unannounced product from Intel: a Kaby Lake-G series which would mark Intel's return foray to a multi-chip module in a singular package. The company has already played with such a design before with its Clarkdale family of processors - which married a 32 nm CPU as well as a 45 nm GPU and memory controller in a single package. Kaby Lake-G will reportedly make away with its simple, low-data rate implementation and communication between two parts, instead carrying itself on the shoulders of Intel's EMIB (Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge), which the company claims is a "more elegant interconnect for a more civilized age."

Instead of using a large silicon interposer typically found in other 2.5D approaches (like AMD did whilst marrying its Fiji dies with HBM memory), EMIB uses a very small bridge die, with multiple routing layers, which provide a good measure of price/data paths for the interconnected, heterogeneous architecture. This saves on the costly TSV (Through-Silicon Vias) that dot the interposer approach.

For now, rumors peg these Kaby Lake-G as special BGA processors based on Kaby Lake, with an additional discrete GPU on the package. The TDP of these processors (at 65 W and 100 W) is well above the Kaby Lake-H's known 45 Watts. Which begs the question: what exactly is under the hood? This, including Intel's modular approach to chip design for which it developed its EMIB technology, could probably account for the AMD graphic's chip TDP - a discrete-level GPU which would be integrated on-die, EMIB's routing layers handling the data exchange between GPU and processor. This is where HBM 2 memory integration would also come in, naturally - a way to keep a considerable amount of high-speed memory inside the package, accessible by the silicon slices that would need to. Nothing in the leaked information seems to point towards this HBM 2 integration, however.