Comment by simondotau | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simondotau | Hacker News Reader

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I find it genuinely astonishing that the contemporary reason for soldering memory onto the motherboard hasn't been raised already. Yes, the reason Apple moved to soldered memory for their MacBook Air line is likely some combination of physical packaging and fleet reliability. But with the latest CPUs, those reasons are now secondary.

The primary reason is now performance. Don't believe me? Look at how RAM is arranged on a GPU or in a game console. The RAM chips are located as close to the CPU/GPU as physically possible, limited only by thermal constraints.

You will never see DIMM slots on an NVIDIA card because the compromises would be untenable. Longer traces means lower performance, while sockets will make the cards thicker and with poorer thermals. The reasons why NVIDIA cards are the way they are correlates with why Apple's latest comptuers are the way they are.

What Apple did with packaging RAM so close to the M1/M2 chip is a big part of the Apple Silicon performance story.

> Yes, the reason Apple moved to soldered memory for their MacBook Air line is likely some combination of physical packaging and fleet reliability.

I love how you've pushed your opinion as fact here, spinning the positives and conveniently omitting the clear anti-consumer advantage that soldering RAM achieved: non-serviceability meant shorter lifetimes, i.e. more replacement sales (and hence more e-waste, but who cares about externalized costs, right?) and more money minted during the original sale (since people couldn't buy and upgrade with cheaper components, they were forced to pay Apple prices). At the time it was implemented, there was no real technical advantage.

Performance benefits have now come along as a bonus, a happy side-effect. But the main mover has always been (and always will be, with Apple) pure and distilled greed.

At the time Apple did this, they had already been soldering RAM onto the motherboards of iPhones because phones needed the smaller envelope. At the time, it was probably more about saving money on manufacturing by not having extra, moving parts, and making it simpler to automate the fabrication. Also, even back then, this would have an impact on thermals and size, which could easily be the only justification needed.

I love how you've pushed your opinion as fact here.

Yup. At least I don't sound disingenuous and shill, tho.

>Look at how RAM is arranged on a GPU or in a game console.

Are those ram chips on a CPU carrier in a POP configuration? or are they fanned out on the PCB allowing technician to replace individual components?

Part of the reason for Apple move to ram on SOC carrier was killing third party market. Now its impossible to repair/upgrade ram. Similar with T1/T2 proprietary pcie NAND in raid configuration.

Exactly which consumer electronics manufacturers do you think are doing enough BGA reflow repairs to make it a factor in their product design?

Not manufacturers, third parties are able to repair normal computers, even with soldered ram. POP ram is soo difficult nobody does that, and Apple NAND is special unobtainable proprietary kind with pcie bus and locked firmware.

Yep, exactly this. Huge, massive power savings by not pumping electrons up literally thousands of long wires to memory, thousands of times per second.

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