Good read. It's sad that we have to resort to soldering components that used to be easily replaceable.
Side note, you all might like @dosdude1 videos:
https://www.youtube.com/@dosdude1
Lots of Mac SSD upgrades, and some vintage stuff to boot.
Side note, you all might like @dosdude1 videos:
https://www.youtube.com/@dosdude1
Lots of Mac SSD upgrades, and some vintage stuff to boot.
One compromise I've seen in laptops is to have both soldered ram and a SODIMM socket. Stock config comes with soldered ram giving the end user the ability to add more ram as required.
CAMM2 modules could / _should_ help in returning replaceable modules to laptops and keep the benefits of having the ram mounted closer to the cpu, but at the cost that its (atleast atm) only a single module, so if you were upgrading from (for example) 8gb to 16gb, you would be left with a unused 8gb module and try and sell it on the resale market.
where are you going to put them in an appropriately thin chassis?
Those memory components are now operating at much, much higher frequencies than in the good old days, and need to be mounted closer and closer to the compute units to reduce latency, making soldering them the easiest way for reliably achieving those frequencies and latencies for best performance.
Especially when you look at high end (g)DDR5 frequencies for APUs and what Apple is cooking with the Mx chips. There's no way you can easily get that using DIMM slots, so soldering it is.
Yeah we used to even have memory slots on GPUs back in the '90s, but those days are long gone now and it's not all due to planned obsolescence but simply due to the performance requirements whos goalposts have moved leagues and bounds since then.
Not arguing about the latency but the chips that have been soldered in that article are operating at much, much lower frequencies than some DDR5 DIMMs you can buy to slot on a desktop mainboard supporting an Intel Raptor Lake or Ryzen 7000 series CPU.
Plus, isn't that laptop also thinner than models with slotted RAM? If you're chasing thinness then soldered is the only way to go even if you're not yet limited by frequency/latency.
Apple's latest M3 processors use LPDDR5-6400. There are systems with socketed memory that do DDR5-6400, so I am not sure what you are talking about. In the server space, Intel's latest Xeons support MRDIMMs at 8800MT/s, which is even faster.
The main advantage I am aware of with on package RAM is lower power consumption. Shorter traces means the memory controller PHY uses less power.
Also LPDDR has lower power requirements than DDR
LPDDR5 does use less power than DDR5, but what I was specifically referring to is the claim that Apple gets higher frequencies than you could get with slotted memories. This isnt true.