Comment by lucb1e
16 hours ago
What performance boost? As in, same software running for comparison on the hardware of interest, one soldered and the other not. I never heard that soldering your SSD on makes it faster...
16 hours ago
What performance boost? As in, same software running for comparison on the hardware of interest, one soldered and the other not. I never heard that soldering your SSD on makes it faster...
It doesn't, Apples SSD performance is fine but unremarkable. Their current machines will do around ~6GB/sec read and ~5GB/sec write, which isn't even at the limit of socketed PCIe4 NVMe drives, nevermind the bleeding edge PCIe5 drives which can do up to ~14GB/sec read and ~12GB/sec write (albeit with excessive heat and power consumption for a laptop).
Soldering the RAM has legitimate performance benefits, but soldering the SSD is just to save space and upsell overpriced upgrades.
It's crazy that some people think it's apple so it must be special and better not realizing NVMe is a industry standard.
Sorry I was referring to the boost you get from having ram integrated into the chip vis-à-vis apple’s M-line of processors.
Having replaceable ram is not really a marketable feature these days.
This might be nitpicking but 1) the ram is not integrated into the chip, per se, it's still discrete and soldered on a PCB right next to the CPU, and 2) the increased speed comes from additional memory channels built into the M-series CPUs, not necessarily the fact that the memory is closer to the CPU.
It is true that it's not currently feasible to have socketed memory in a laptop offering 8+ memory channels to enable 200GB/sec+ bandwidth, but you can absolutely get the same (or greater!) memory speeds as an M-series CPU from an x86 desktop workstation.
If Intel/AMD wanted to prioritize memory bandwidth, they could probably work with JEDEC or another industry org to develop a new standard for socketed memory with multiple channels per socket, to enable the kind of speeds that Apple offers. The fact that they haven't (to my knowledge) indicates to me that they don't see it as a big enough priority or benefit.