Apparently AMD couldn’t make the signal integrity work out with socketed RAM. (source: LTT video with Framework CEO)
IMHO: Up until now, using soldered RAM was lazy and cheap bullshit. But I do think we are at the limit of what’s reasonable to do over socketed RAM. In high performance datacenter applications, socketed RAM is on it’s way out (see: MI300A, Grace-{Hopper,Blackwell},Xeon Max), with onboard memory gaining ground. I think we’ll see the same trend on consumer stuff as well. Requirements on memory bandwidth and latency are going up with recent trends like powerful integrated graphics and AI-slop, and socketed RAM simply won’t work.
It’s sad, but in a few generations I think only the lower end consumer CPUs will be possible to use with socketed RAM. I’m betting the high performance consumer CPUs will require not only soldered, but on-board RAM.
Sound like a downgrade to me I rather have capability of adding more ram than having a soldered limited one doesn’t matter if it’s high performance. Especially for consumer stuff.
Looking at my actual PCs built in the last 25 years or so, I tend to buy a lot of good spec ram up front and never touch it again. My desktop from 2011 has 16GB and the one from 2018 has 32GB. With both now running Linux, it still feels like plenty.
When I go to build my next system, if I could get a motherboard with 64 or 128GB soldered to it, AND it was like double the speed, I might go for that choice.
We just need to keep competition alive in that space to avoid the dumb price gouging you get with phones and Macs and stuff.
I definitely wouldn’t mind soldered RAM if there’s still an expansion socket. Solder in at least a reasonable minimum (16G?) and not the cheap stuff but memory that can actually use the signal integrity advantage, I may want more RAM but it’s fine if it’s a bit slower. You can leave out the DIMM slot but then have at least one PCIe x16 expansion slot. A free one, one in addition to the GPU slot. PCIe latency isn’t stellar but on the upside, expansion boards would come with their own memory controllers, and push come to shove you can configure the faster RAM as cache / the expansion RAM as swap.
Heck, throw the memory into the CPU package. It’s not like there’s ever a situation where you don’t need RAM.
All your RAM needs to be the same speed unless you want to open up a rabbit hole. All attempts at that thus far have kinda flopped. You can make very good use of such systems, but I’ve only seen it succeed with software specifically tailored for that use case (say databases or simulations).
The way I see it, RAM in the future will be on package and non-expandable. CXL might get some traction, but naah.
The cache hierarchy has flopped? People aren’t using swap?
NUMA also hasn’t flopped, it’s just that most systems aren’t multi socket, or clusters. Different memory speeds connected to the same CPU is not ideal and you don’t build a system like that but among upgraded systems that’s not rare at all and software-wise worst thing that’ll happen is you get the lower memory speed. Which you’d get anyway if you only had socketed RAM.
In systems where memory speed are mismatched, the system runs at the slowest module’s speed. So literally making the soldered, faster memory slower. Why even have soldered memory at that point?
Apparently AMD couldn’t make the signal integrity work out with socketed RAM. (source: LTT video with Framework CEO)
IMHO: Up until now, using soldered RAM was lazy and cheap bullshit. But I do think we are at the limit of what’s reasonable to do over socketed RAM. In high performance datacenter applications, socketed RAM is on it’s way out (see: MI300A, Grace-{Hopper,Blackwell},Xeon Max), with onboard memory gaining ground. I think we’ll see the same trend on consumer stuff as well. Requirements on memory bandwidth and latency are going up with recent trends like powerful integrated graphics and AI-slop, and socketed RAM simply won’t work.
It’s sad, but in a few generations I think only the lower end consumer CPUs will be possible to use with socketed RAM. I’m betting the high performance consumer CPUs will require not only soldered, but on-board RAM.
Finally, some Grace Hopper to make everyone happy: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gYqF6-h9Cvg
Sound like a downgrade to me I rather have capability of adding more ram than having a soldered limited one doesn’t matter if it’s high performance. Especially for consumer stuff.
Looking at my actual PCs built in the last 25 years or so, I tend to buy a lot of good spec ram up front and never touch it again. My desktop from 2011 has 16GB and the one from 2018 has 32GB. With both now running Linux, it still feels like plenty.
When I go to build my next system, if I could get a motherboard with 64 or 128GB soldered to it, AND it was like double the speed, I might go for that choice.
We just need to keep competition alive in that space to avoid the dumb price gouging you get with phones and Macs and stuff.
I definitely wouldn’t mind soldered RAM if there’s still an expansion socket. Solder in at least a reasonable minimum (16G?) and not the cheap stuff but memory that can actually use the signal integrity advantage, I may want more RAM but it’s fine if it’s a bit slower. You can leave out the DIMM slot but then have at least one PCIe x16 expansion slot. A free one, one in addition to the GPU slot. PCIe latency isn’t stellar but on the upside, expansion boards would come with their own memory controllers, and push come to shove you can configure the faster RAM as cache / the expansion RAM as swap.
Heck, throw the memory into the CPU package. It’s not like there’s ever a situation where you don’t need RAM.
All your RAM needs to be the same speed unless you want to open up a rabbit hole. All attempts at that thus far have kinda flopped. You can make very good use of such systems, but I’ve only seen it succeed with software specifically tailored for that use case (say databases or simulations).
The way I see it, RAM in the future will be on package and non-expandable. CXL might get some traction, but naah.
The cache hierarchy has flopped? People aren’t using swap?
NUMA also hasn’t flopped, it’s just that most systems aren’t multi socket, or clusters. Different memory speeds connected to the same CPU is not ideal and you don’t build a system like that but among upgraded systems that’s not rare at all and software-wise worst thing that’ll happen is you get the lower memory speed. Which you’d get anyway if you only had socketed RAM.
In systems where memory speed are mismatched, the system runs at the slowest module’s speed. So literally making the soldered, faster memory slower. Why even have soldered memory at that point?