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Comment by endgame

2 days ago

One possible reason: to achieve the performance improvements, we are seeing more integrated and soldered-together stuff, limiting later upgrades. The Framework Desktop from the modular, user-upgradeable laptop company, has soldered-on memory because they had to "choose two" between memory bus performance, system stability, and user-replaceable memory modules.

If the product succeeds and the market starts saying that this is acceptable for desktops, I could see more and more systems going that way to get either maximum performance (in workstations) or space/power optimisation (e.g. N100-based systems). Then other manufacturers not optimising for either of these things might start shipping soldered-together systems just to get the BoM costs down.

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endgame

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scns  1 day ago

> The Framework Desktop from the modular, user-upgradeable laptop company, has soldered-on memory because they had to "choose two" between memory bus performance, system stability, and user-replaceable memory modules.

No need to pick on Framework here, AMD could not make the chip work with replaceable memory. How many GPUs with user replaceable (slotted) memory are there? Zero snark intended

Aurornis  1 day ago

That’s a laptop. It’s soldered for space constraints.

There are high speed memory module form factors. It just adds thickness, cost, expense, and they’re not widely available yet.

Most use cases need the high speed RAM attached to the GPU, though. Desktop CPUs are still on 2-channel memory and it’s fine. Server configs go to 12-channel or more, but desktop hasn’t even begun to crack the higher bandwidth because it’s not all that useful compared to spending the money on a GPU that will blow the CPU away anyway.