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by wishinghand 321 days ago
Why is that? Why would soldering the connections vs plugging them in affect how much data per second they transfer?
2 comments

Sockets have resistance and crosstalk, which affects signal integrity.
Wait, your telling me, I should have been desoldering the sockets off my motherboard, and directly soldering my RAM to the leads this entire time?
Compression Attached Memory Module (CAMM) tries to be a middle-term solution for that, by reducing how crappy your average RAM socket is to latency and signal integrity issues. But, at this point, I can see CAMM delivered memory being reduced to a sort of slower, "CXL.mem" device.
Seriously though,

Would desoldering the sockets help?

Why are the sockets bad?

As stated previously, the sockets reduce signal integrity, which doesn't necessarily make them "bad," but is why Framework wasn't able to used socketed ram to maximize the potential of this CPU.

This sort-of-interview of Nirav Patel (ceo of framework) explains in a bit more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lErGZZgUbY

Basically, they need to use LPDDR5X memory, which isn't available in socketed form, because of signal integrity reasons.

Which means you won't see an improvement if you solder your ram directly, I think mostly because your home soldering job will suffer signal integrity issues, but also because your RAM isn't LPCAMM and isn't spread across a 256 bit bus.

They "why" hasn't been answered. I understand the previous statements very clearly. It makes intuitive sense to me, but I want to know more.

Like physics PhD-level more.

Only if you were pushing data through so fast that the bits got corrupted before. That's literally why AMD told Framework they won't support any other configuration than soldered RAM, in this case.
Yes. (That isn't actually possible because the pinouts are different but soldered RAM is faster.)
You might be able to dial in a higher memory overclock.
mind the gap