SoC (System-on-Chip)
A chip that integrates nearly the entire computer system — CPU, GPU, memory controller, NPU, modem, I/O — onto a single piece of silicon, instead of separate components on a motherboard. Standard in phones and increasingly in laptops (Apple Silicon). It gives low power, small size, and high integration.
Idea: in a traditional PC, the CPU, GPU, chipset, and memory are separate components connected over buses on a motherboard. An SoC packs everything onto one chip: processor cores (often heterogeneous P+E), graphics, a memory controller, an NPU (AI accelerator), image/video units, a security processor, and sometimes a modem. Wins: much shorter distances between the blocks (lower latency, higher bandwidth, lower power), small physical size, and high energy efficiency — crucial for mobile. Examples: Apple's A-series (iPhone) and M-series (Mac), Qualcomm Snapdragon, Google Tensor. Apple Silicon showed that the SoC model with unified memory (the CPU and GPU share the same memory) can beat traditional separate components even in laptops. Trade-off: no upgradability (everything is fixed). The dominant design model for modern consumer devices. Related to heterogeneous cores and ASIC.