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Comment by PlunderBunny | Hacker News Reader

>The thing that mostly irks me about Apple these days is soldered in RAM and non-upgradeable storage.

Isn't the 'soldered-in' RAM and storage fundamental to the M-series architecture? It's not like there's a board with individual chips sitting in it for the RAM and storage, that could potentially have been 'popped out' if they weren't soldered in. It's all one giant 'chip' now.

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There are separate chips.

But just like Strix Halo, they have to be soldered. There’s no way to reach the signal integrity required with connectors.

No, M series is a system on chip (SoC), that’s why it’s able to run local LLM models in a range impossible for other laptop brands: VRAM == RAM, unified shared memory at max speed for both CPU and GPU

Strix Halo has the same unified RAM with no separation.

Sadly it’s not in many laptops, probably the easiest way to obtain it is in the Framework Desktop or a mini pc.

I've heard many people saying CAMM2 solves this.

We're still waiting to see any CAMM-style memory module show up in a mass market product at any speed, instead of merely getting press coverage where the number of articles written seems to outnumber the number of laptops actually built and shipped. But even if you are willing to take the examples thus far seriously as real products, they haven't come close to matching the speed of soldered LPDDR.

I was considering an LPCAMM2-fitted Thinkpad. I was eyeing to buy one with less memory and then buy a 96GB module to upgrade it. However, the module was nowhere to be found in stock, and where it was found, it was priced almost like the whole laptop.

CAMM is still less effective than in-package RAM bundled with your CPU. The Framework folks looked into using CAMM for their recent AMD APU-based desktop and it was a no go.

It could be a compromise that’s better than DIMMs, though. Not every task needs this insane memory bandwidth and (as small as it gets) latency, although I admit it’s so damn nice, but it’s also nice that if memory goes bad, I can just replace it.

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