[wtallis]

> Laptops that have soldered RAM (including Apple) do not come with overclocked RAM though. I don't even know of any system with soldered RAM that would let you try pushing the speeds in practice, so this advantage is never leveraged.

This is unsurprising given what I already pointed out about power being more important than maximizing performance. Sure, you can overclock the memory controller on a desktop platform and with sufficiently expensive DIMMs and probably a bit of an overvolt for the memory controller/uncore you can reach higher bus speeds than any laptop CPU (though still not anywhere near as high as GDDR used with high-end mobile GPUs).

But take a look at the fastest memory speeds available through SODIMM slots vs the speed of LPDDR4x supported by the same CPUs. Within the constraints of laptop power levels and using standard grade memory parts rather than requiring premium binned chips, soldering currently corresponds to a 33% performance advantage.