To add to this, is the problem of the ideals that capitalistic companies brainwash us into liking. Replaceable batteries on phones is a huge example: If you go back to the year 2002 and try to release a feature phone (pre-smart phone) that has a fucking case sealed with glue and no replaceable battery, you’d get raked over the coals for it and will absolutely get called out for your shameless cash grab of a phone. Even in 2007-2010, tons of critics of the iPhone was still, rightfully, calling out the fact that you can’t replace the battery. Samsung and plenty of other Android manufacturers famously called them out over it and boasted that their phones have replaceable batteries and therefore will last longer (which is true at least on the hardware level, the battery fails in most phones long before the other components do). Annnnnnd jump to the 2020s where every single phone has sealed in batteries, and somehow the mainstream now thinks that having a replaceable battery (as in, a back case that opens easier than Fort Knox) is somehow a sign of a low quality phone. The excuse is made that more “premium” case materials like metal and glass can’t easily be made into a form factor that can open easily (which is total BS by the way, you’re just too lazy and/or greedy to design it), or that a non-sealed case can’t be made to to be IP69 or whatever rating of waterproofness (why do you need a regular phone to withstand anything more than rain or water spills, or at the very worst accidentally dropping into a sink or bathtub and being fished right back out? Which a gasket around the removable case can absolutely do, see: cheap sport watches with replaceable batteries. If I needed to capture images of a blobfish at the bottom of the Marinara’s Trench, sure, I’ll consider a sealed device for waterproofing, otherwise fuck off.) I’d take a thicker phone made of cheap plastic that comes off more easily to reveal a battery and SD card slot over a “premium” feeling phone any day (for that I have a Fairphone, which is great), but apparently I’m in the minority now. And it’s not like 90% of people don’t put a case on their phone and cover up whatever it’s made of anyway. Yeah, you can really feel that chamfered unobtanium edge and mythril back plate through that plastic and rubber OtterBox!
Same with soldered CPUs in computers. There was a time where even laptop CPUs were socketed. This made the laptops a little thicker but WAY more upgradable. Now, neither Intel nor AMD even make non-BGA (that’s the style of soldering for large chips) mobile CPUs anymore, and there is increasing push to solder even desktop CPUs to the motherboard, starting with small form factor, embedded, and special purpose motherboards but absolutely inevitably spreading to that minifridge sized gaming PC of yours that literally has no excuse to not have a socket, and yet, I guarantee you they’ll think of some excuse to do it and the techbro influencers will convince everyone that this is the best way.
We could literally take the 1980s style of home computers where all the RAM chips are socketed (literally individual chips, not on a stick) and it would still work just as well and everything would still be just as fast. Except now you would have way more flexibility in upgrading your machine and could easily replace individual dead chips.
Or especially Graphics Cards manufacturers could totally just let you upgrade your card’s VRAM and Processor(s). They just choose not to.
I guess the only devil’s advocate there is that to achieve higher memory bandwidths, you do actually need the RAM to be as close to the processor as possible. It’s why Apple’s M1 and M2 processors have higher real-world memory speeds than Intel processors because they moved the RAM to literally on the CPU package itself, as much as I don’t like Apple. You also have things like HBM where the RAM is just a bare silicon die right next to the processor die, with a silicon interposer underneath connecting both that can do much higher signalling rates than any circuit board.
But, to say that this validates never being able to upgrade the RAM is still a stupid argument. There are ways to have your cake and eat it too. Dell recently came up with their CAMM modules which have a physical design that places the RAM chips much closer to the processor than SODIMM slots, and there are theoretically even faster module concepts like having a socketed RAM module on the bottom of the board directly opposite to the processor. Or, you could have a compute module where maybe the processor and RAM is one piece, but you can change the CPU and RAM combo while keeping the rest of the device. Or, how about this, a compute module or CPU package with onboard high speed memory or HBM, and lower speed slots that allow for expansion? Modern memory controllers are definitely smart enough to map memory in a way where the things that are accessed the most or require the highest bandwidth would be moved to the faster memory. Individual compression sockets for modern RAM chips like we have for the CPU, like your suggestion, either on the chip itself or extremely close to it, would definitely be harder to pull off due to the much tighter tolerances of modern day memory, but definitely not impossible.
Well, fucking, said.
To add to this, is the problem of the ideals that capitalistic companies brainwash us into liking. Replaceable batteries on phones is a huge example: If you go back to the year 2002 and try to release a feature phone (pre-smart phone) that has a fucking case sealed with glue and no replaceable battery, you’d get raked over the coals for it and will absolutely get called out for your shameless cash grab of a phone. Even in 2007-2010, tons of critics of the iPhone was still, rightfully, calling out the fact that you can’t replace the battery. Samsung and plenty of other Android manufacturers famously called them out over it and boasted that their phones have replaceable batteries and therefore will last longer (which is true at least on the hardware level, the battery fails in most phones long before the other components do). Annnnnnd jump to the 2020s where every single phone has sealed in batteries, and somehow the mainstream now thinks that having a replaceable battery (as in, a back case that opens easier than Fort Knox) is somehow a sign of a low quality phone. The excuse is made that more “premium” case materials like metal and glass can’t easily be made into a form factor that can open easily (which is total BS by the way, you’re just too lazy and/or greedy to design it), or that a non-sealed case can’t be made to to be IP69 or whatever rating of waterproofness (why do you need a regular phone to withstand anything more than rain or water spills, or at the very worst accidentally dropping into a sink or bathtub and being fished right back out? Which a gasket around the removable case can absolutely do, see: cheap sport watches with replaceable batteries. If I needed to capture images of a blobfish at the bottom of the Marinara’s Trench, sure, I’ll consider a sealed device for waterproofing, otherwise fuck off.) I’d take a thicker phone made of cheap plastic that comes off more easily to reveal a battery and SD card slot over a “premium” feeling phone any day (for that I have a Fairphone, which is great), but apparently I’m in the minority now. And it’s not like 90% of people don’t put a case on their phone and cover up whatever it’s made of anyway. Yeah, you can really feel that chamfered unobtanium edge and mythril back plate through that plastic and rubber OtterBox!
Same with soldered CPUs in computers. There was a time where even laptop CPUs were socketed. This made the laptops a little thicker but WAY more upgradable. Now, neither Intel nor AMD even make non-BGA (that’s the style of soldering for large chips) mobile CPUs anymore, and there is increasing push to solder even desktop CPUs to the motherboard, starting with small form factor, embedded, and special purpose motherboards but absolutely inevitably spreading to that minifridge sized gaming PC of yours that literally has no excuse to not have a socket, and yet, I guarantee you they’ll think of some excuse to do it and the techbro influencers will convince everyone that this is the best way.
We could literally take the 1980s style of home computers where all the RAM chips are socketed (literally individual chips, not on a stick) and it would still work just as well and everything would still be just as fast. Except now you would have way more flexibility in upgrading your machine and could easily replace individual dead chips.
Or especially Graphics Cards manufacturers could totally just let you upgrade your card’s VRAM and Processor(s). They just choose not to.
On the topic of graphics cards, on NVidia’s Kepler cards, specifically the consumer versions, if you de-soldered a single resistor and replaced it with another that has a different value it would suddenly identify itself as its professional counterpart..
I guess the only devil’s advocate there is that to achieve higher memory bandwidths, you do actually need the RAM to be as close to the processor as possible. It’s why Apple’s M1 and M2 processors have higher real-world memory speeds than Intel processors because they moved the RAM to literally on the CPU package itself, as much as I don’t like Apple. You also have things like HBM where the RAM is just a bare silicon die right next to the processor die, with a silicon interposer underneath connecting both that can do much higher signalling rates than any circuit board.
But, to say that this validates never being able to upgrade the RAM is still a stupid argument. There are ways to have your cake and eat it too. Dell recently came up with their CAMM modules which have a physical design that places the RAM chips much closer to the processor than SODIMM slots, and there are theoretically even faster module concepts like having a socketed RAM module on the bottom of the board directly opposite to the processor. Or, you could have a compute module where maybe the processor and RAM is one piece, but you can change the CPU and RAM combo while keeping the rest of the device. Or, how about this, a compute module or CPU package with onboard high speed memory or HBM, and lower speed slots that allow for expansion? Modern memory controllers are definitely smart enough to map memory in a way where the things that are accessed the most or require the highest bandwidth would be moved to the faster memory. Individual compression sockets for modern RAM chips like we have for the CPU, like your suggestion, either on the chip itself or extremely close to it, would definitely be harder to pull off due to the much tighter tolerances of modern day memory, but definitely not impossible.
👏🔥 Exactly!