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Comment by thetinguy | Hacker News Reader

The MacBook Air has an SOC. It’s literally not possible to socket the ram. It’s all one big package.

>The MacBook Air has an SOC. It’s literally not possible to socket the ram

Hardware engineer here: It is totally technically possible to have a SoC and socketed RAM.

Please stop taking Apple's own proprietary implementation as being some universal technical limitations for the entire industry. It's not.

While it’s possible, wouldn’t it defeat some of the advantages of moving everything closer together?

Has anyone added socketed ram to any of the Qualcomm, Mediatek, Rockchip etc laptops out there?

Ok, but now you're moving the goalposts and switching to whataboutism. The original comment was about whether it's impossible or not to have SoCs with socketed RAM. Just because the rest of the ARM vendors also choose not to (because that's how it is in phones and tablets and because it increases obsolescence and their profits) does not negate this fact.

I was mostly just asking the question, as I'm not an expert in the nuances of DRAM timing/latency/etc nor chip design.

... but we also didn't define whether we were using "possible" in an academic or commercial sense.

What do you mean by "commercial sense"? There are literally Intel and AMD based laptops sold right now with socketed high speed DDR5 sticks, so of course it's commercially possible.

It depends on the market segment of the device. Many of the segments that ARM devices compete with are also segments where sockets aren't common in x86 either. I mean, we all know Ampere devices typically have socketed RAM, but that's because different compromises were made in those devices vs. the compromises made in a thin low-power laptop.

The thin-and-light segment has some pretty tough competition, and the best sellers are not the devices with the most sockets.

If you're choosing to put an ARM processor in a laptop, you're probably doing so because it helps you accomplish some of the things this market wants: a smaller thermal solution, lower power consumption, slick packaging, etc. Adding sockets doesn't really help you commercially position that particular product any better, it only hurts you.

>The thin-and-light segment has some pretty tough competition, and the best sellers are not the devices with the most sockets.

Again, the original comment I addressed was the fallacy that it's technically impossible to have socketed RAM on SoCs, which is false, not whether the device with more sockets is better seller which is probably also false, but again, this was not the main topic and we can continue to discuss forever on the pros and cons of RAM sockets, so, having made my technical point clear, I will end the conversation here.

I think that's an unfair interpretation of that comment. They most likely meant that you couldn't just lift the DRAM off the package and put it on a standard module, all else equal. It would require other significant design compromises to accomplish that. LPDDR4X socketed modules don't even exist.

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