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Comment by nazgu1

19 days ago

In old times there were an option to upgrade ram and storage using stock parts form hardware store, but now everything is soldered.

AFAIK now the ram gets to be way closer this way (which is why the M series gets to destroy everyone on benchmarks where it can show off that).

I think that it'd be cool to have that memory become an L4 cache and still have cheaper ram as a backing store with more capacity to fence off the CPU from the abysmal latencies that SSDs and, satan forbids, HDDs have.

  • The RAM speed comes from the 512bit wide bus, not the direct connection. If motherboard makers were to support quad or octa channel interfaces, PCs would be just about as fast.

    • RAM throughput comes from a wide bus, but I think that nowadays memory access latency is getting pretty important to keep the CPUs working.

It is still current times in PC desktop land, and why I keep on Windows/Linux land.

There still is today; any custom built desktop can be upgraded easily. Most laptops that are more enterprise focused still have RAM and SSD slots, and replaceable batteries too.