I won’t hold my breath on Apple using this. It’d destroy their upsell from 8gb process in one fell swoop.
Apple only do consumer friendly when forced by the EU.
And even then they'll think of the most malicious way to comply:
Forced to change the connector to USB C? Better only give it USB 2.0 speeds on the regular and Plus model.
Forced to allow third party app stores? Better give it as many restrictions and limits as possible. I assume/hope they'll eventually be forced to open up more, but they'll fight it for as long as possible.
It’d destroy their upsell from 8gb process in one fell swoop.
There's a video where someone upgrades the memory of an iPhone by cnc'ing the existing memory chip. So basically using a drill to more or less drill the existing chip to get rid of it. Requires crazy precision.
What the fuck? Like its not even bga or some other kind of soldering?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbSDdU8bJI0 here's the video.
So I guess it was UV epoxied after soldering and he put new epoxy on with the new nand. Or something along those lines but the component is soldered in a typical way. The rotary tool being used to pull out the residual phone glue is excellent and I feel like I learned something useful even though I'm never going to do an iPhone ram upgrade.
They'd have to redesign their SoCs. The memory chips are right next to the SoC with the M chips.
I could 100% see them offering user replaceable memory, but with a slower max speed than factory installed. Gotta have something to point to when the regulators come a-knockin.
Good news I guess as I’ll never again buy a new computer which can’t be upgraded in the long term.
It ain’t my vision anymore and I hope more and more consumers think about buying second hand or buying upgradeable computers.
How about phones? They are a computer after all.
I'm in the proces of choosing a new one (forced by hardware failures of current one) a I hate having to choose all of its parameters with no possibility of any upgrade or meaningful configuration at the time of purchase.
Bring back THE RAMBUS!
I remember learning about this in the early 00's but then the textbooks were saying about this newer memory technology which the world has moved to known as DDR! Makes me feel so old now 👵
I wonder if it means something for handheld devices like Steam Deck.
"we created the problem of soldered-on ram! now we have the solution: a new standard, for no fucking reason!" -every memory, board, and system company
But the article explains that there is a technical reason.
For the curious (and lazy):
According to repair biz iFixit, the issue with the power-frugal LPDDR memory chips is that the lower voltage they operate at calls for more attention to be paid to signal integrity between the CPU and memory. In practice, this has meant shorter track distances on the circuit board, leading to LPDDR being soldered down as close to the processor as possible.
LPCAMM2 is intended to address this by putting LPDDR onto a circuit board module that is "cleverly designed to mount right up next to the CPU," with "very short traces to help maximize signal integrity," the iFixit team explains in a blog and video detailing their hands-on with the ThinkPad P1 Gen 7.
the lower voltage they operate at calls for more attention to be paid to signal integrity between the CPU and memory
And they aren't kidding around, modern high speed signals are so fast that a millimeter or less of difference in length between two traces might be enough to cause the signals to arrive at the other end with enough time skew to corrupt the data.
Edit: if you ever looked closely at a circuit board and seen strange, squiggly traces that are shaped like that for seemingly no reason, it's done so that the lengths can be matched with other traces.
A millimeter is huge in these situations. USB3 requires 5 mil tolerances, just over 0.1 mm. This scales with the inverse of data rate.
Electronics are so fast that we gotta take the speed of light into account. God help you if you put too sharp a bend in a trace, too ...
Haha, I'm still over here messing with 10/100 Ethernet and USB 2 on my home projects. I'm used to bigger tolerances than the truly high tech stuff.
Same, but now I'm working on very high-speed stuff for work and starting to get into that hobby-wise as well. Just yesterday had a conversation with a colleague about how things are getting too small to hand-solder.
My dedicated AI machine uses 1866mhz DDR3. Consumers don't know what they need and will buy whatever the latest new thing is. Smart phones are so dumb. Like wow, your brand new $2500 phone has a benchmark 4x faster than my refurbished $250 phone. Now tell me what you do with all that power. "...well I save 27ms per Instagram post which adds up with how much I use it". I want to run headfirst into a brick wall.
I meant PCBs. I design custom circuit boards.
Like this one: https://www.tindie.com/products/bmoreautomation/esp-r8-poe-3c-automation-controller/
What is a mil in this context? I'm genuinely curious.
Probably one thousandth of an inch.
I've heard it referred to as 'thou' but not 'mil'
A couple old metrology equipment dated back from the 80s I still use calls them 'mil'. It's got dual dials for mil/mm. Gets me confused sometimes because the gauge can go down to couple millionths of an inch/couple 10s of nanometers.
LVDT for those curious.
Correct.
A millimeter i.e a thousands of a meter.
edit: I was wrong, confusingly enough it is a thousands of an inch
5 mm isn't 'just over 0.1 mm'. That can't be right.
Well, it depends on your margin of error.
In the design and manufacture of PCBs (aka circuit boards) a "mil" is a one thousandth of an inch, so it makes sense that's what is being used in this context.
Also the maths check out: 0.005 inches is equal to aprox 0.12mm, "just over 0.1mm".
I still don't understand, why this is seemingly no problem in any other application.
Desktops, servers and even some chonkier laptops manage to work with regular (SO)DIMMs just fine.
I'm guessing regular non-LP DDR works fine socketed in desktops because power is nearly a non-issue. Need to burn a few watts to guarantee signal integrity? We've got a chonky PSU, so no problem. On mobile devices however every watt matters..
Plus the smaller chips (like the CPU) are designed for lower voltage and current. They can't handle dialing up the power, they'll melt.
Normal DIMMs work fine but soldered RAM can just be much faster and in general better. It's not an acceptable compromise on most desktops but for laptops which also has to be smaller and need to worry about stuff like battery life, it matters more.
Sounds like there is a bunch of nuance in this topic!
But I want clear black and white distinctions and outrage!!!
Laptops with sodimm DDR5 not only use much more power, but they're also slower than LPDDR5.
Ex: the Intel Thinkpad T16 has 5600mhz ram in sodimm form, but with soldered RAM (AMD version) it's like 6400mhz.
Desktops/servers get around this the best they can by just blasting the power away.
My understanding is that those are slower (SODIMMs) or are able to use more power (DIMMs) to maintain signal fidelity.
"they did it to save power!!! 111 one eleven"
there was perfectly fine memory that was upgradable before. They (system integrators/oems) saw it as a way to kill the upgrade market, boosting profits.
"It's more performant than the old SODIMM sticks, vastly more efficient, it saves space, and it should even help with thermals as well. All that, and it's still about as repairable as anything we've ever seen," iFixit concluded.
Yes, there was a perfectly fine, upgradable memory standard before. And many 486s were also perfectly fine, upgradable computers.
The fact that a new technology makes it so we can have our cake and eat it too
upgradability without any compromise
is a fantastic innovation.
So you believe that the performance improvement and power saving is not worth creating a new standard?
Yeah if you are clueless you’d think they done it for no reason
Now let's see it on an sff PC mobo.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
