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Apple marketing worked great on you. Putting ram on package was to upsell you on a higher more expensive model and prevent life cycle prolonging field upgrades.
by rasz 4y ago
Apple marketing worked great on you. Putting ram on package was to upsell you on a higher more expensive model and prevent life cycle prolonging field upgrades. Anything below 1024bits is just cost cutting and forces market segmentation. Xbox has no problem fanning out 320bit bus in addition to pcie lanes, same for hiend GPUs. HMB Apple was alluding to but carefully not saying out loud starts at 4096bits.
M1/M2 ram is just 128bit like any other normal mobile processor. M1/M2 Pro comes with 256bit bus (2 custom LPDDR5 chips) and 200 GB/s, M1/M2 Max with 512bit.
POP ram makes sure nobody will be able to upgrade, hardware locked recurring revenue.
- faeriechangling 4y agoI'm pretty excited about the potential of on-package memory to enable LLM's and other AI stuff to run on local hardware with higher performance than using DDR DIMMs and lower cost than shelling out 80 grand for a pair of H100s. When the arguments for DIMMs are "field upgrades" which is a problem you can avoid by buying more memory to begin with (Also in practice few users actually upgrade memory), and "price segmentation" which isn't really a technical consideration, I see the writing on the wall. At least in the consumer space.
- rasz 4y agoYou are excited about swapping out somehow making for better performance? Even biggest M2 Max cant fit bigger models. I dont know anyone with older macbook who didnt max out ram as soon as it became financially sensible.
- alfor 4y agoI agree with you. I think Apple is trailblazing again. Most laptop will go in that direction. Tighter integration will lead to a better performance/cost and better efficiency also. AMD 3D cache is also going in that direction integrating ram/cache on top of cpu with high density of interconnect.