Be real fukin careful now. You’ll tear my enacs from my cold dead hands

(But yeah, I use evil-mode. Also I edit files on remote servers with vim. I’m a traitor…)

Because you’d get like half the memory bandwidth to a product where performance is most likely bandwidth limited. Signal integrity is a bitch.

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.

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