&quot;have hundreds of passive components sprinkled around the board&quot;<p>Resistors, inductors and capacitors are used to match the characteristic interface impedance (RLC) for many types of interfaces - there&#x27;s often a integrated matching component near your Ethernet port.  Capacitors are also used to &quot;quiet&quot; the power supply lines as they enter the integrated circuits.<p>These passive components are rarely used when interconnecting the different &quot;chips&quot; in a system as you design your system to use compatible parts.  And with additional integration in the SoC, I&#x27;m guessing you&#x27;ll need additional capacitors around the chip.<p>In short (too late?), I&#x27;m skeptical as to whether it will reduce the number of passive components at all.  It will definitely make laying out a circuit board easier (except with BGA, you&#x27;ll need multi-layer anyway).