the “change” is that laptop ram is socketed again?
They explain in the video that SODIMM socketted RAM is bulky and power hungry. The low power chips used to need to be soldered, but this is a new way to use the low power smaller chips with a socket. That’s the difference.
ah, power constraints. yeah that tracks
And signal integrity. At modern speeds trace lengths are spec’d in mils and dimms can be tough to design for (or just more expensive) so OEMs just solder ram directly.
Can we have removable batteries again now?
And the socket can be changed too, if I read the article correctly. The verge article posted in this thread elsewhere.
It runs at 120 GB/s…
As a Mac user that sounds pretty shit. RAM in a MacBook Pro runs at 400GB/s and that’s a CPU which will be obsolete in the next few months, with a new one coming that’s expected to be more like 500GB/s.
Sure, modular memory is great. But not if it comes with a performance penalty like that.
You’re comparing apples and oranges.
The speeds you mention are defined by the memory type, not the connector.
As far as I can tell, there is no reason this connector could not, and won’t be, used with more advanced memory types. Including the type in apple silicon, and beyond.
Why is bandwidth so important? The M2 is about half as fast as a DDR4 era x86 desktop processor with half the memory bandwidth.
This memory has1/4 the bandwidth of M series Mac’s. It may be possible to match current memory with 4 chips. But that would take a lot of room. And that leaves little room for growth.
When the memory is shared with the GPU, bandwidth becomes much more important. A desktop will just use a dedicated GPU if it needs the performance.
Hopefully it can go mainstream with adoption from oems and ram kit manufacturers though I’m pretty sure it will cost a fortune for such kit that want to edges out both performance and repairability.
That could be a good news of they don’t skyrocket prices