alt Hacker NewsCan they double the memory lanes without switching socket ? If not I feel like PC is going to fall behind even further compared to Apple chips. Having ram on chip sucks for repairability but 500gb/s main ram bandwidth is insane.
They stumbled into the right direction with strix halo but I have a feeling they won't recognize the win/follow up.
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Not easily, and you will need a new motherboard anyhow because each of the 2 slots you can have per lane are wired in tandem.
The socket io locks in the amount of memory channels. Some pins could be repurposed but that's pretty much a new socket anyway.
They could in theory do on package dram as faster first level memory, but I doubt we'll see that anytime soon on desktop and it probably wouldn't fit under the heat spreader
> Can they double the memory lanes without switching socket?
Sure. Keep the DIMM sockets and add HBM to the CPU package.
Actually probably the best possible architecture. You can choose to have both or only one, backward compatible and future proof.
Yes, it adds another level to the memory hierarchy but that can be fine tuned.
The "insane" RAM bandwidth makes sense with Apple M chips and Strix Halo because it's actually "crap" VRAM bandwidth for the GPU. What makes those nice is the quantity of memory the GPU has (even though its slow), not that the CPU has tons of RAM bandwidth.
When you go to the desktop it becomes harder to justify including beefed up memory controllers just for the CPU vs putting that towards beefing some other part of the CPU up that has more of an impact in cost or performance.