The difference is that until recently, consumers could swap/add RAM/NPU/GPU/etc. Now they're more often epoxied together on the same chip, even if they were produced on two different silicon wafers.

For example, the newer Intel Lunar Lake chip packages together a CPU+iGPU+NPU chiplet and two LPDDR5X RAM chiplets [0][1][2]. If laptop manufacturers want to offer different amounts of RAM, they have to buy a different CPU SKU for 16GB RAM vs 32GB RAM. Panther Lake, the succeeding generation, reversed this and will support off-package RAM modules, but some reasonable people might assume that in the long term RAM will generally be on-package for anything that's not a server/HEDT.

You won't have to worry about making sure the RAM you buy is on the CPU & Motherboard QVL list, but also you won't ever buy RAM by itself at all.

Intel's Clearwater Forest Xeon chip has 12 CPU chiplets, connected together in groups of 4 CPUs each connected to the same 1-of-3 "base" chiplets, and then 2 I/O chiplets. For a total of 17 chiplets, depending on how you count the "base" chiplets which are 'just' fabric, memory controllers, and L3 cache (which is all shared directly between all 4 CPU's). Each group of 4 CPU's sit on top of that base chiplet. [3]

0: https://www.flickr.com/photos/130561288@N04/albums/721777203...

1: (pages 3 and 4) https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/content-details/8244...

2: (also pages 3 and 4, but the technical detail in the rest of these slides is much more detailed) https://hc2024.hotchips.org/assets/program/conference/day1/5...

3: page 12 https://hc2025.hotchips.org/assets/program/conference/day1/1...