this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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For most intents and purposes
SoC is from the embedded system development world - as more and more coprocessors were being put into the same chip to consolidate board space and power efficiency, it wasn’t “just” a cpu - it had the CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, and other coprocessors in one
x86 has moved a lot closer to this architecture over the years, but you still generally have a separate chipset controller on the motherboard the CPU interfaces with
The reason is flexibility, the board manufacturer can decide how many PCIe lanes to send where, how many USB ports there's going to be etc. Modern mainboards are a power delivery system and IO backplane.
I haven’t looked that closely at laptop CPUs
My guess would be partially because there are fewer possible interfaces, and they’re directly connecting the CPU to a separate Ethernet/WiFi MAC, USB hub controller, and audio DSP rather than having a separate chipset arbitrating who’s talking to the CPU and doing some of those functions?