There are legitimate advantages of the RAM being soldered right next to the SoC. However, if anyone could figure out how to create a proprietary RAM module, that slots in right next to the SoC (or even just an SoC module including RAM) that can be swapped out and that doesn‘t have any meaningful performance impact, it would be Apple. Just that it never could be Apple…
The problem is the electrical resistance of the socket. Most of the performance on apple silicon is achieved through extremely high bandwidth, low latency memory. Unfortunately that necessitates a socketless design at the moment, and you can see that happening on the snapdragon X too.
Yea, not just snapdragon and apple. Even intel and amd processors usually get paired with higher bandwidth soldered ram on many mobile offerings.
And on GPUs soldered VRAM has been a thing for a loooong time, with HBM memory being the prime example for what RAM close to the chip can do. AMD‘s Vega cards were highly sought after during the mining craze, even though they weren’t that fast in general computing, simply because their memory bandwidth was so beyond any other consumer cards…
There are legitimate advantages of the RAM being soldered right next to the SoC. However, if anyone could figure out how to create a proprietary RAM module, that slots in right next to the SoC (or even just an SoC module including RAM) that can be swapped out and that doesn‘t have any meaningful performance impact, it would be Apple. Just that it never could be Apple…
The problem is the electrical resistance of the socket. Most of the performance on apple silicon is achieved through extremely high bandwidth, low latency memory. Unfortunately that necessitates a socketless design at the moment, and you can see that happening on the snapdragon X too.
Yea, not just snapdragon and apple. Even intel and amd processors usually get paired with higher bandwidth soldered ram on many mobile offerings.
And on GPUs soldered VRAM has been a thing for a loooong time, with HBM memory being the prime example for what RAM close to the chip can do. AMD‘s Vega cards were highly sought after during the mining craze, even though they weren’t that fast in general computing, simply because their memory bandwidth was so beyond any other consumer cards…