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Framework’s first desktop is a strange—but unique—mini ITX gaming PC
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
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Apparently AMD couldn’t make the signal integrity work out with socketed RAM. (source: LTT video with Framework CEO)
IMHO: Up until now, using soldered RAM was lazy and cheap bullshit. But I do think we are at the limit of what’s reasonable to do over socketed RAM. In high performance datacenter applications, socketed RAM is on it’s way out (see: MI300A, Grace-{Hopper,Blackwell},Xeon Max), with onboard memory gaining ground. I think we’ll see the same trend on consumer stuff as well. Requirements on memory bandwidth and latency are going up with recent trends like powerful integrated graphics and AI-slop, and socketed RAM simply won’t work.
It’s sad, but in a few generations I think only the lower end consumer CPUs will be possible to use with socketed RAM. I’m betting the high performance consumer CPUs will require not only soldered, but on-board RAM.
Finally, some Grace Hopper to make everyone happy: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gYqF6-h9Cvg
I definitely wouldn't mind soldered RAM if there's still an expansion socket. Solder in at least a reasonable minimum (16G?) and not the cheap stuff but memory that can actually use the signal integrity advantage, I may want more RAM but it's fine if it's a bit slower. You can leave out the DIMM slot but then have at least one PCIe x16 expansion slot. A free one, one in addition to the GPU slot. PCIe latency isn't stellar but on the upside, expansion boards would come with their own memory controllers, and push come to shove you can configure the faster RAM as cache / the expansion RAM as swap.
Heck, throw the memory into the CPU package. It's not like there's ever a situation where you don't need RAM.
All your RAM needs to be the same speed unless you want to open up a rabbit hole. All attempts at that thus far have kinda flopped. You can make very good use of such systems, but I’ve only seen it succeed with software specifically tailored for that use case (say databases or simulations).
The way I see it, RAM in the future will be on package and non-expandable. CXL might get some traction, but naah.
Couldn't you just treat the socketed ram like another layer of memory effectively meaning that L1-3 are on the CPU "L4" would be soldered RAM and then L5 would be extra socketed RAM? Alternatively couldn't you just treat it like really fast swap?
Wrote a longer reply to someone else, but briefly, yes, you are correct. Kinda.
Caches won’t help with bandwidth-bound compute (read: ”AI”) it the streamed dataset is significantly larger than the cache. A cache will only speed up repeated access to a limited set of data.
Using it as cache would reduce total capacity as cache implies coherence, and treating it as ordinary swap would mean copying to main memory before you access it which is silly when you can access it directly. That is you'd want to write a couple of lines of kernel code to use it effectively but it's nowhere close to rocket science. Nowhere near as complicated as making proper use of NUMA architectures.
Could it work?
Yes, but it would require:
Right now, the easiest solution for fast, high-bandwidth RAM is just to solder all of it.