Apple to Raise Prices Due to Memory Chip Crunch

4 months ago (wsj.com)

Apple has historically been able to keep prices the same even when everyone expected them to increase. Not a great sign that even Apple, with supply/pricing usually locked up years in advance, has to raise prices.

I thought they fabbed RAM on-chip.

  • This question bothers me because I have never found a clear authoritative documentation.

    The more detailed sources say, contra the mainstream impression, that Apple Silicon's vaguely-named "unified memory" is technically a hybrid System-on-Chip and System-in-Package architecture. The memory banks DRAM are on a second die (one source said it is made by Samsung), but the RAM controller sits on the CPU die and manages the RAM for the unified memory pool for graphics/main/neural memory usage (hence, "unified" from an ISA perspective). Both IC dies coexists on a shared enclosed package as a single microchip. Technically this is still called a System-on-Chip architecture according to Wikipedia because the electrical engineering definition allows for some parts, such as RAM or I/O, to still exist separately off the main piece of silicon die yet still be called an SoC architecture. In short, it is not a monolithic SoC.

    I have tried several times to find citations about this but it is an ambiguous point that is often glossed over, as a kind of hardware abstraction.

so what have consumers gained from the 'A.I' boom ?

kids missing out on games - cz Switch prices went up.

regular joes - consumer hardware went up at least 50% from RAM, SSDs & other components

I guess regular joes gained the ability to 'chat' with a stochastic parrot & vibe code useless things.