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I'm sure this will find use in Business-Class "Mobile workstations", but having integrated DDR4 in my own hardware, I have a hard time seeing this as the mainstream path forward for mobile computing. There's lots of value in tight integration. Improved signal integrity (ie, faster), improved reliability, better thermal flow, smaller packaging, and lower cost. Do I really want to compromise all of those things just to make RAM upgrades easier? And how many times do I need to upgrade the RAM in a laptop, really? Twice? Why make all those sacrifices to use a connector, instead of just reworking the DRAM parts? A robotic reflow machine is not so complex that a small repair shop couldn't afford one, which is what you see if you to to parts of the world where repair is taken seriously. Why do I need to be able to do it at home? I can't re-machine my engine at home. It's the most advanced nanotechnology humanity can produce, why is a $5k repair setup unreasonable? This is not to mention the direction things are really going, DRAM on Package/Die. The signaling speed and bus widths possible with co-packaged memory and HBM are impossible to avoid, and I'm not going to complain about the fact that I can't upgrade the RAM separately from the CPU, any more than I complain about not being able to upgrade my L2 cache today. The memory is part of the compute, in the same way the GPU memory is part of the GPU. I hope players like iFixit and Framework aren't too stubborn in opposing the tight integration of modern platforms. "Repairable" doesn't need to mean the same thing it did 10 years ago, and there are so many repairability battles that are actually worth fighting, that being stubborn about the SOTA isn't productive. |
Don't know would say the reverse, workstation might need the performance of DRAM on Package/Die, but I don't believe it's the case for mainstream user.
> A robotic reflow machine
Same maybe to service enterprise customer but probably way too expensive for mainstream.
I certainly hope that players continue to oppose tight integration and I'll try to support them. I value the ability that anyone can swap ram and disks to easily upgrade or repair their device more than an increase of performance or even battery life.
I recently cobbled up a computer for a friend's child with component from three different computers; any additional cost would have made the exercise worthless.