3 ms·
I know everyone on this site loves to hate on soldered ram, but my impression is most people don’t understand that soldered ram is not the same thing as regular
by MobiusHorizons 2y ago
I know everyone on this site loves to hate on soldered ram, but my impression is most people don’t understand that soldered ram is not the same thing as regular ram modules. They are literally different memory chips (LPDDR vs DDR) . When built to a specific chip my understanding is you can design for tighter timings and higher bandwidth which is important for the gpu. The M1 shipped with very fast LPDDR4X running at 4266MT/s which was even pretty fast by XMP desktop speeds at the time (2020). There are real engineering advantages to soldered ram especially if the memory controller has need designed with to take advantage of it. I guess it is similar to how gpu memory configurations are specialized and not modular.
- ulyssys 2y agoThe objection to soldered RAM isn’t the RAM.
- AnthonyMouse 2y agoYou're making two separate points here. The first is the timings, which is nominally real but it was never a huge difference. Moreover, the new CAMM standard aims to address this and basically does. The legacy SODIMM standard wasn't great and is essentially what caused this. The second is the bus width. If you use slotted memory and want a wide bus then you need at least one slot per channel and then you could end up needing a lot of slots. This isn't impossible -- servers do it -- but there is a cost attached to it. But this doesn't apply to systems that aren't using a wide bus. The base M3 has the same bus width as ordinary dual-channel PCs. The Pro has the equivalent of four channels or, for the newer generation, three. That's still not a crazy number in a high end system. With CAMM it would only be two modules, since the modules are each 128-bit. By way of comparison, Threadripper has four or eight channels and modern servers have dozens.