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by katmannthree 354 days ago
From your careful word choice you know this but I'd like to draw attention to the specifics here. I'm not sure if it's actually soldered on but RAM is on-package like apple's M-series chips, unlike what used to be the case where soldering ram to the board was a choice made by the laptop mfgs.

Here's there's no choice to be made other than not using the chips. And unfortunately (although there are some benefits), it's probably not going to be just a few generations but a trend for high end processors going forward.
1 comments
joshfee 354 days ago
It is actually one of the few cases where I don't actually really care about independent upgradability. In my experience I find that I pretty much always upgrade my CPU and my RAM in tandem. New CPU architectures sometimes force it (e.g. need DDR5 instead of DDR4), and as long as you don't severely undersize your initial RAM choice I find that I run out of CPU headroom before I run out of RAM headroom.

So if there's performance gains to be had by co-locating RAM with the CPU in a single package, it makes sense to me to do so

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fragmede 354 days ago
> and as long as you don't severely undersize your initial RAM choice

That's the problem though. when dealing with used machines (because new ones are beyond your budget), you get cheaper hand me downs, and those are going to be of your undersized RAM variety. In the socketed days, you could get a five year old laptop, replace the existing RAM with the biggest sticks you cloud get your hands on, and get a few more years of life out of the machine. A laptop stuck at four gigs of ram these days isn't going to be great for much web browsing, but is also basically stuck at four gigs.

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