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Really? Why though? Is soldered-in RAM attached differently to the CPU?
Way differently.
Soldered RAM is much much closer to the CPU, and so the time it takes for signals to propagate back and forth is significantly reduced..
It's probably the increased capacitance (think of of it as a puddle that needs filling before the water can move beyond it) of a mechanical connnection system vs direct soldering that makes most of the difference.
I was going to call you out on the distance thing but I made the maths and indeed at 100GHz light only travels about 3mm between waves and electric signal propagation on a line is roughly lightspeed (if you disregard capacitance) so even though this memory bus is likely not working at 100GHz to get 100GB/s (it's actually using paralellism for increase bits per cycle) it is none the less already within clock speed ranges were distances of centimeters do mater.
That said keep in mind that rountrip propagation only really maters at the very biginning of the download of a memory block as that when the address goes down and the data starts coming back and the roundtrip propagation affects the delay between them.
But yeah, I can see how you would start worrying with centimeter and even millimiter distances when trying to extract a bit more performance from data exchanges at these clock speeds.
This is an argument that just gets repeted. My question is this, is a macbook faster than a gaming pc? Because that has replaceble ram, cpu, gpu, ssd, etc. If yes, then please seek help.
The PC GPU does have it's own soldered RAM. But then the performance of a good GPU goes way past that of a MacBook, which while good for integrated graphics, is still only on par with a GTX 1660, a four year old budget GPU.
Well fucking said dude. You know dGPUs used go have upgradable RAM? They removed it because it dosen't work for that application. Apples iGPUs struggle to compete even being soldered partly because the competition is using GDDR and they aren't. Not soldering would make them even further behind.
I guess in a way they are stuck to a form factor, as slim as possible. And they got stuck so they had to do something. But then why would they make everything locked to the system by hardware id. It just seems that they used the speed argument to justify anti consumer pactices.
Yeah they locked it because they are anti-consumer. Soldered RAM has actual benefits, that's why they aren't the only company doing it. Two very different issues. It's like them soldering in SSDs is anti-consumer because there is little benefit there and only a few companies are copying them.
Speed is not "just an excuse" either. This design is dependant on having RAM that fast, it's faster than any other laptop that I have seen for a good reason. It also improves battery and reduces size.
The M1 design is very similar to the SoC in your phone. The RAM is literally soldered on top of the CPU.
Erm yeah. Have you never seen an M1 chip? It's on the same substrate.