8GB of LPDDR3 costs about $30 retail. So they went from a 330% markup to a 660% markup. Nice.
Some PC laptop vendor could do a whole TV campaign based around the idea of turtle-necked folk setting fire to money and smiling, because it makes them feel better, and that's really all that matters[.. right?]
This limits the spaces available to RAM so they're probably swapping out higher density (i.e. more expensive) chips. They also can't just pull a Macbook off the shelf, slap an extra DIMM in it, box it up, and ship it.
It's their own fault but... yeah.
Only Macs and the PC ultra portables tend to forgo them.
Except LPDDR3 is not a custom low yield part since they're present in phones, game consoles, SSDs, cameras, VR headsets, etc. They're as off the shelf as they get.
So, at a minimum your flashing new ram parms to a SPD, or hacking the device model number somewhere. AKA, even with a rework station its likely a lot more than just swapping the chips, if there is sufficient PC/etc linage you might be able to swap the SPD chip as well, otherwise its going to be more than a mechanical heat it up, clean the pads, and drop/heat the new chip.
As to 'times as fast' vs 'times faster' vs 'times slower': I don't see how there could be any confusion.
Possibly you gloss over the words as you're used to them, but don't stop to think what each paper really means? I didn't either until one day I stopped and did.
I wrote a blog post about this, but unfortunately never got around to posting it because I think it came across as rather pedantic. I surveyed the language used to express speedup in systems papers using benchmarking in top conferences and produced this table:
https://twitter.com/ChrisGSeaton/status/1253654667579531265/...
Each row is a different way to talk about the same thing, then the English way to say it, then each column is what this looks like for a different example value, then the actual mathematical expression.
Just to emphasise this - each column is the same empirical result, and then each row in the column is a different way to express that same result, that I've seen in a paper.
> The latter is obvious, the former is not.
I'm afraid it isn't as obvious to everyone, and other people may think it's obviously something different to you. You'll notice that some English phrases can be interpreted in multiple reasonable ways. Is running in half the time '1 times faster' or '2 times faster'? You'll see both in the wild.
> As to 'times as fast' vs 'times faster' vs 'times slower': I don't see how there could be any confusion.
Is '2 times as fast' the same as '2 times faster'? Some papers think so, others not.
Have you read the root comment of this thread... that's an example of real-world confusion right there! Just with markup not speedup. It's the same maths and the same confusion.
Unsolicited coaching tip: don't spend many cycles on stuff like this at work.