Comment by webmobdev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by webmobdev | Hacker News Reader

That's ok. I'll choose the ability to self-repair and upgrade, even with the "limited" bandwidth of user-replaceable RAM, over soldered or "integrated" RAM and SSD for planned obsolescence anytime.

The base model aluminium Intel Mac Minis started out with 2GB RAM, then 4 GB and finally 8 GB - all over a span of 8 years. Many of these models would be useless today if you couldn't upgrade the RAM at all. In fact, the 2014 Mac Mini models with soldered RAM (LPDDR) received a very poor reception and Apple was forced to backtrack and go back to user-replaceable RAM with the next Mac Minis ( https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_mini/mac-mini-aluminu... ).

Many of the early adopters of Apple Silicon M1 devices noticed heavy usage of their SSD, which many attributed to heavy swapping due to the limited (non-upgradable) RAM in the M1 devices. Apple finally said it was a bug ( https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/06/04/apple-resolves-m1... ) and recommended upgrading macOS. But many of these early adopters are less than satisfied and still spend a lot of anxious time worrying whether their soldered SSD's life has reduced by a year or two because of the increased usage. Their concerns are real because with soldered SSDs, you obviously have to do a very, very costly repair through Apple if the soldered SSD chips conk out.

Imagine if you have to replace your whole CPU / SoC to upgrade just your RAM because the RAM is now integrated with the CPU / SoC!? (This is ignoring that even CPUs are now unnecessarily being soldered in many Apple and non-Apple desktops and not easily upgradeable ...).

At some point, the cost-benefit analysis of such soldered / integrated parts doesn't work out in favour of us consumers. And that's what we need to consider before blindly giving up ease of repair for some brief performance increase. (While I have specifically highlighted Apple because they are the only one currently using integrated RAM with their CPU / SoCs, my criticism is directed at the others too, including Dell, HP, Lenovo etc. who are following the same path of planned obsolescence by soldering components to make them less repairable and reduce their life. Unless we start supporting repairability - like with https://frame.work/ devices - we consumers are in a very slippery slope of losing our right to own and repair our devices).

> That's ok. I'll choose the ability to self-repair and upgrade

How do you upgrade your L2 cache? You're not still using a 486, are you?

Did you protest the Pentium as well?

That's a bit disingenuous, isn't it? Of course at some point you'll need a newer processor and chipset to make use of the latest features and innovations.

But you can just move your unsoldered M.2 SSD to the new board. And when properly supported by OEMs, motherboards can last you for generations of CPUs.

There are B350 and X370 boards that were released with the Ryzen 7 1800X in 2017, that support the recently released 5800X3D, a processor two generations of microarchitecture newer on an entirely different node. And while that processor still has the same amount of L2, you get six times the L3 cache of it's predecessor.

> That's a bit disingenuous, isn't it?

No, it's not. Well, at least it wasn't intended to be.

The whole point of my post is: What were you supposed to do with all of the expensive cache chips you bought for your 486 when the Pentium came out?

--> They weren't soldered on, but you couldn't use them anymore if you wanted to upgrade your Pentium. <--

How is the situation with RAM today any different?

The only difference I see is that we now expect cache to be soldered on. I imagine in the future we'll expect the same of RAM too.

No. The reason the average consumer accepts limited cache memory in CPU / GPU / HDD / SSD etc, despite the high bandwidth they offer is simply because of the cost - they are very expensive. Thus, consumers accept the reasonable compromise to sacrifice some performance to match their budget. Otherwise, why wouldn't we all purchase server grade hardware? Or we could all be using high-speed SRAM for our RAM without even the need for cache memory in our CPUs. Hell, if SSDs get as fast as even dynamic RAM then we could even do away with the RAM completely - it would be a significant departure / upgrade from the Princeton and Harvard computer architecture that we currently use.

Yes, we expect cache to be built-in because the manufacturers of high-speed memory realistically don't expect the average consumers to be their target market, and thus chose the B2B model to sell their product. Nobody (that I know of) has also explored offering upgradeable cache memory as an option to consumers (hard to know if it even possible with current CPU / SoC hardware).

As for consumers changing their expectation to accepting soldered RAM and SSDs, that remains to be seen - anything is possible with powerful lobbying and PR. Personally, I think Intel and AMD would be fools to not treat any "integrated" RAM in their future CPUs as "L4 / L5 cache memory" while still fully supporting DIMM DDR RAM as that would make their CPUs more powerful and more desirable than Apple Silicon SoCs. Note that unlike Apple, they don't sell a closed-box solution and have to support multiple OS platform. Thus, it would be more difficult for them to offer a "one size fits all" built-in RAM with their CPUs.

> No. The reason the average consumer accepts limited cache memory in CPU / GPU / HDD / SSD etc, despite the high bandwidth they offer is simply because of the cost - they are very expensive

The 486.

> Yes, we expect cache to be built-in because the manufacturers of high-speed memory realistically don't expect the average consumers to be their target market

The 486.

> Nobody (that I know of) has also explored offering upgradeable cache memory as an option to consumers

The 486.

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