Unique Intel SoMa processor spotted on Chinese forums and eBay

This story began on Twitter. Recently, user Momomo_US posted a photo of what appears to be an Intel LGA processor with a striking and perplexing feature: instead of one or even two dies, its substrate housed four dies:

Rumors suggest this is a test sample of a Skylake-based processor designed for the LGA 1156 socket. The chip itself was produced almost four years ago.

Based on the scattered information available, we can draw a few conclusions:

1. This is an extremely convincing fake designed to generate buzz and draw attention to the Chinese community.

2. Intel, much like AMD, genuinely experimented with chiplet designs, but for some reason, the company ultimately decided to postpone its adoption.

3. It's also entirely possible that this is a custom-ordered chip, similar to the processors Sony and Microsoft commission from AMD for their consoles. However, this particular order never reached the mass production stage.

The dies themselves are extremely close in size to dual-core Skylake dies. In other words, this could be an 8-core, 16-thread processor assembled from four Core i3 dies. Even more surprisingly, its production cost would be much lower than Intel's current flagship, the Core i9-9900K. This is because the yield of smaller, 2-core dies would be far greater than that of monolithic 8-core dies.

Moreover, if the chip isn't a fake (and it likely isn't), then Intel may have already perfected chiplet technology over the past four years, meaning we could see announcements for processors with structures similar to current AMD Ryzen chips in the near future.

Furthermore, the sheer quantity—around 100,000 units—suggests this processor is unlikely to be a fake. You can actually buy them on eBay