Comment by sspiff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sspiff | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah manufacturers love this evolution because it means everyone who wants or needs high memory will be forced to buy for their projected memory needs throughout the live cycle of the product on day one, and the only place they can get it is at inflated prices from the vendor.

I wonder how they will do this in the workstation and server space, I don't really see how they can do away with socketed CPUs.

I wonder if we will go back to slotted CPUs, with a SOM style board with CPU and memory being plugged into a motherboard/chassis that's really just an I/O back plane. How will multi Cpu communication look then?

I guess we already have memory being pinned to a NUMA node and connecting to others via a vendor specific interconnect, so maybe it's not that strange and different from today.

> I wonder how they will do this in the workstation and server space, I don't really see how they can do away with socketed CPUs.

I'm guessing the endgame will be consumer parts all being RAM-on-package with no external memory interface, and workstation/server parts will take a hybrid approach like Intel is already doing with the Xeon Max chips which have 64GB HBM on the package and an external DDR5 interface supporting terabytes of slower bulk memory.

Almost nobody upgrades a socketed CPU.

Sockets still make sense because you can choose between 10 or so different CPUs for a particular socket format.

But with just in time manufacturing you can imagine ordering the CPU directly from the motherboard manufacturer which solders it in place.

I haven't upgraded this CPU yet, as it's still too new, but my last motherboard got two new CPUs, and previous was 2-3? (Maybe more it was awhile ago, thanks AMD)

> Almost nobody upgrades a socketed CPU.

Given that AMD has been releasing AM4 CPUs since 2016, I think it's reasonable to assume that many of those who know how to build computers in the first place have upgraded their CPU. Why switch the whole motherboard/CPU combination when you can just plug in a better CPU?

Well, if you've been using Intel platforms you do because Intel obsoletes the chipsets at a rapid pace so there often isn't anything appreciably better to upgrade to on the platform.

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