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submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by veloren23djk@lemmy.zip to c/askelectronics@discuss.tchncs.de

My friend told me that macbooks have their RAMs behind the CPU (or something along those lines) and it got me wondering. Does the distance between CPU and memory really make that much difference? 🤔

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[-] Krusty@quokk.au 3 points 3 days ago

Yes.

If you really want to see some interesting data then search data eye. It's basically an infinity. Yet the exact eye itself is the dual peak and valley (DDR transmission on rise and fall off the signal).

This is why memory is positioned as close to the CPUs possible because the longer those traces are the more latency that's involved but ultimately in memory even though we've gone to much higher bandwidth latency has remained pretty similar for the last several decades.

So yeah that's why you often see the CPU ... and the ram is right next to it on the motherboard! And if you go better than that you might get some high bandwidth memory on the chip itself otherwise known as cache. Which level 1 caches can exceed 1 TB/s. Most RAM you're looking at 10s of GB/s. There's even some that can certainly hit around 100 GB/s. But that's usually the more specialty gddr. The data eyes on quad pumped memory are quite beautiful. Kind of like fractals.

this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2026
24 points (96.2% liked)

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