> Don’t forget - they solder in the flash too even though there is no technical reason to do so.
There is, Apple uses flash memory as swap to get away with low RAM specs, and the latency and speed required for that purpose all but necessitates putting the flash memory directly next to the SoC.
Yeah but some people need to justify their $1,800 USD purchase of laptop that comes with only 8 GB of RAM. Even though most laptops manufactured today would also come with NVMe (PCIe directly connected to the CPU, usually) flash storage, which is used by all operating systems as swap.
It's harder to confirm for laptops but you can refer to motherboard manuals to see if any of your PCIe-related slots go through a switch or not. For example, my current PC has a PCIe x16 slot, x1 slot, and two M.2 NVMe slots. It says everything is integrated into the CPU except the x1 slot which goes through the motherboard chipset. I don't see why any laptop would make NVMe go through a PCIe switch unless the CPU doesn't provide enough lanes to support everything supported by the motherboard. Even the at the lowest end, a dual core Intel Core i3-10110U
(laptop processor from 2019) has 16 lanes from the CPU which could support at least one NVMe without going through a switch.
There is, Apple uses flash memory as swap to get away with low RAM specs, and the latency and speed required for that purpose all but necessitates putting the flash memory directly next to the SoC.