It'll be interesting to see where this happens. I have to hand it to Apple, it's bold that they have on-package RAM that's so wide. (And then doubling and quad

It'll be interesting to see where this happens. I have to hand it to Apple, it's bold that they have on-package RAM that's so wide. (And then doubling and quadrupling whole core complex with tiling is a stunning move; Pro and Max.) Apple shipped a huge range at all once: a very capable mobile chip to a very beastly workstation grade chip. Intel's most notable attempt to me was Lakefield (2019), a Mobile Internet Device (MID) class (sub-laptop) chip that I quite liked. The 1+4 architecture wasnt very fast and it was a bit more power intense than the Snapdragons of the day that it had a modest-to-significsnt lead over. But I loved that it was like this tiny tiny package that you basically just had to add power to, and the on-package LPDDR4X-4266 was a very speedy offering for 2019. Intel's upcoming Lunar Lake mobile was shown in January, rocking tiled (doesn't look like a stacked/3D Foveros setup) on package ram. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21219/ces-2024-intel-briefly-shows-lunar-lake-chip-nextgen-mobile-cpu-uses-onpackage-memory https://www.anandtech.com/show/21219/ces-2024-intel-briefly-... But both AMD and Intel already have big on-package ram cores. Intel's been shipping a "Max" Sapphire Rapids with 64GB HBM2e for a year (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-launches-sapphire-rapids-fourth-gen-xeon-cpus-and-ponte-vecchio-max-gpu-series https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-launches-sapphire-ra...). Like Apple's Ultra, it's a quad-tile with each CPU having a it's own HBMe stack. AMD's MI300A is basically a GPU where some of the tiles are instead CPUs but it too has 8 stacks of HBM3. I keep asking myself how & when & where is on-package ram going to arrive in. But there's already significant HBM presence in big cores! It didn't seem to make an huge difference for Sapphire Rapids; some help but unless one uses the expensive accelerators well there s probably not enough core to use it. Meanwhile MI300 is only just happening & more API focused. We have yet for on package ram to really be meaningful & available & making a difference like it did for Apple. But as your post says, it feels like an inevitability. Someone's gonna make a core that can do more or be better by having lower powered faster local ram. Part of my suspicion is that the market is resisting de-segmentation. The real issue is that Apple used on package ram to add many channels. Not of slow wise HBM memory, but mamy channels of DDR ram. These companies don't actually want to compete on throughout; they want throughput to be associated with $10k exotic chips. They are lament to build higher bandwidth more-channel consumer cores. That starts to change some next year with AMD's Strix Halo, a big APU with quad-channel ram. There's no on-package ram as far as I've heard, but once you start having that much board real estate & energy going to ram, it sure would be nice to get even more performance for less power & much less space. Damn I love on package setups. 2024 doesn't seem likely to offer much new or exciting, but 2025 has some possible signs for hope.