Soldering RAM isn't really done for the sake of latency, it's done to save physical volume and to lower power from the memory PHY not having to fight against a connector's insertion loss.
Soldering the RAM is good for literally every single use case that doesn't involve the vanishingly-low probability that someone will want to upgrade the RAM in their tablet or phone.
Less weight, less cost, better long-term reliability... but one in a hundred thousand nerds get thwarted. Wearing my hardware-dev hat, I'm more than OK with that.
This is just another case of "We made it hard and annoying to do, so nobody's doing it. Let's remove it entirely.".
You need to start from the other direction. How many people are buying new devices every year? What would it take to get them to upgrade their existing devices instead? How do we prevent manufacturers from sabotaging this kind of effort?
To be clear, nobody, but nobody, is a bigger right-to-repair advocate than I am. And I walk the talk. I've shipped hardware whose user manual, at my insistence, included schematics.
But the last time I upgraded the RAM in a PC to keep from having to buy a new one was in the late 1990s, if I remember correctly.
The last time I upgraded the RAM in a portable device -- even a laptop PC, much less a phone -- to keep from having to buy a new one? That would be never... and I'd definitely remember that.
Forcing literally billions of users to pay more because a microscopic minority might want to upgrade their RAM is terrible business, and, frankly, terrible engineering. It's never going to happen again; the ship has sailed. Sorry.
But the last time I upgraded the RAM in a PC to keep from having to buy a new one was in the late 1990s, if I remember correctly.
When did you last buy a new PC then? What could have discouraged you from doing so? Those are the questions we need to focus on, not this kind of defeatism.
Forcing literally billions of users to pay more because a microscopic minority might want to upgrade their RAM is terrible business, and, frankly, terrible engineering. It's never going to happen again; the ship has sailed. Sorry.
In practice, you might pay a little more initially but a lot less over the long run.
I generally buy a new PC when I can get a solid 2x speed improvement in all of the applications that matter to me. Same with the OS. They are generally upgraded at the same time, as upgrading an existing Windows installation is always a giant bag of hurt.
That's why I'm still running Win7 on a 3 GHz Sandy Bridge from 2011 (and am continually amazed/saddened at how long it's lasted.)
It's coming close to the time when it will make sense to upgrade to a Win10 or Win11 box with an i9 or Ryzen 9 and a 4090 GPU. But I'm not quite there yet, and not at all looking forward to it.
Phone-wise I'm in exactly the same boat. I still use an iPhone 6, and am still very happy with it. It's coming to the end of its second battery lifetime, runs fewer applications every day, and unfortunately I do need a better camera. So I'll have to upgrade pretty soon.
In neither case would a RAM upgrade be the slightest bit useful. I wish it were that simple.
Historically I tend to look at the Passmark single-thread score, in order to compare apples to apples. Multithread scores obviously depend most heavily on the number of cores, and I don't have any apps that max out the core count on my existing rig.
For single-thread, the 3.6 GHz i7-12700k does 4061, where my 3.4 GHz i7-2600k does 1741. So the 2x threshold is met, but it's not a blowout. Raptor Lake is looking worthwhile, though, at 4700+ for i9-13900. At this point I'm mostly just hanging on to see what breaks first, the hardware or the ancient Win7 installation.
I also go by passmark single thread generally, and 1741 to 4061 is definitely a blowout.
It'd be sooo much more responsive.
I went from an i7-8700k to an i9-12900k recently (2751 to 4210), and I was surprised how much better it is, even staying with DDR4 to save a bit of cash. Well, a lot of cash (64Gb).
I was expecting better, but it's even better than I expected. 2600k to 12700k would be a massive difference. Of course the latest and greatest 13900k is better but it's only 15% better ST than the 12900k. I do like the better power efficiency though. But at the moment, at least here in Australia, it's more expensive than the performance increase over the 12900k.
It's really nice to have instant switching between windows and tabs, and smooth scrolling everywhere. I'm more fussy than most about that kind of stuff though. Probably more fussy than you if you're still ok with a 2600k.
I also stuck with Windows 7 for way too long but eventually I got forced off because of some software that wouldn't work anymore.
If you're like me, I would investigate the LTSC releases of Windows 10. I did an in-place upgrade to an older LTSC, and then upgraded to the latest so I didn't have to do a full reinstall.
I think you would want Windows 11 if you did get a 13th-gen CPU with the improved thread scheduling though.
Couldn't agree more with you. There are thousands of valid reasons for having a repairable laptop. But upgrade-able RAM is such a non-issue that it erodes the validity of the entire movement by people claiming it to be important.
Comments
Aren't RAM latencies due to refresh etc. at least 100X what the wire-delay from speed of electric signal would add to having it farther from the CPU?
Soldering RAM isn't really done for the sake of latency, it's done to save physical volume and to lower power from the memory PHY not having to fight against a connector's insertion loss.
Soldering the RAM is good for literally every single use case that doesn't involve the vanishingly-low probability that someone will want to upgrade the RAM in their tablet or phone.
Less weight, less cost, better long-term reliability... but one in a hundred thousand nerds get thwarted. Wearing my hardware-dev hat, I'm more than OK with that.
This is just another case of "We made it hard and annoying to do, so nobody's doing it. Let's remove it entirely.".
You need to start from the other direction. How many people are buying new devices every year? What would it take to get them to upgrade their existing devices instead? How do we prevent manufacturers from sabotaging this kind of effort?
To be clear, nobody, but nobody, is a bigger right-to-repair advocate than I am. And I walk the talk. I've shipped hardware whose user manual, at my insistence, included schematics.
But the last time I upgraded the RAM in a PC to keep from having to buy a new one was in the late 1990s, if I remember correctly.
The last time I upgraded the RAM in a portable device -- even a laptop PC, much less a phone -- to keep from having to buy a new one? That would be never... and I'd definitely remember that.
Forcing literally billions of users to pay more because a microscopic minority might want to upgrade their RAM is terrible business, and, frankly, terrible engineering. It's never going to happen again; the ship has sailed. Sorry.
When did you last buy a new PC then? What could have discouraged you from doing so? Those are the questions we need to focus on, not this kind of defeatism.
In practice, you might pay a little more initially but a lot less over the long run.
I generally buy a new PC when I can get a solid 2x speed improvement in all of the applications that matter to me. Same with the OS. They are generally upgraded at the same time, as upgrading an existing Windows installation is always a giant bag of hurt.
That's why I'm still running Win7 on a 3 GHz Sandy Bridge from 2011 (and am continually amazed/saddened at how long it's lasted.)
It's coming close to the time when it will make sense to upgrade to a Win10 or Win11 box with an i9 or Ryzen 9 and a 4090 GPU. But I'm not quite there yet, and not at all looking forward to it.
Phone-wise I'm in exactly the same boat. I still use an iPhone 6, and am still very happy with it. It's coming to the end of its second battery lifetime, runs fewer applications every day, and unfortunately I do need a better camera. So I'll have to upgrade pretty soon.
In neither case would a RAM upgrade be the slightest bit useful. I wish it were that simple.
>I generally buy a new PC when I can get a solid 2x speed improvement in all of the applications that matter to me.
Let's say it's an i5-2320... even a last-gen i7-12700k is 167% faster on single-core and almost 10x faster for multi-core.
You could buy an i7-10700k from 2020 and get double the SC speed. Combined with an NVMe boot drive, that's gonna feel sooo much more responsive.
I'd want to hang myself having to wait for an i5-2320 these days.
Upgrade it dude, life's too short to live with that.
Historically I tend to look at the Passmark single-thread score, in order to compare apples to apples. Multithread scores obviously depend most heavily on the number of cores, and I don't have any apps that max out the core count on my existing rig.
For single-thread, the 3.6 GHz i7-12700k does 4061, where my 3.4 GHz i7-2600k does 1741. So the 2x threshold is met, but it's not a blowout. Raptor Lake is looking worthwhile, though, at 4700+ for i9-13900. At this point I'm mostly just hanging on to see what breaks first, the hardware or the ancient Win7 installation.
I also go by passmark single thread generally, and 1741 to 4061 is definitely a blowout.
It'd be sooo much more responsive.
I went from an i7-8700k to an i9-12900k recently (2751 to 4210), and I was surprised how much better it is, even staying with DDR4 to save a bit of cash. Well, a lot of cash (64Gb).
I was expecting better, but it's even better than I expected. 2600k to 12700k would be a massive difference. Of course the latest and greatest 13900k is better but it's only 15% better ST than the 12900k. I do like the better power efficiency though. But at the moment, at least here in Australia, it's more expensive than the performance increase over the 12900k.
It's really nice to have instant switching between windows and tabs, and smooth scrolling everywhere. I'm more fussy than most about that kind of stuff though. Probably more fussy than you if you're still ok with a 2600k.
I also stuck with Windows 7 for way too long but eventually I got forced off because of some software that wouldn't work anymore.
If you're like me, I would investigate the LTSC releases of Windows 10. I did an in-place upgrade to an older LTSC, and then upgraded to the latest so I didn't have to do a full reinstall.
I think you would want Windows 11 if you did get a 13th-gen CPU with the improved thread scheduling though.
edit: Actually the 13900k isn't that much more power-efficient, it uses 15% more power when fully loaded than 12900k for 43% better MC performance.
For a SC load it's about the same watts for 15% better performance.
But you'd have to be doing a lot at one time to need that kind of MC speed.
https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/intel_core_i9_13900k_r...
Couldn't agree more with you. There are thousands of valid reasons for having a repairable laptop. But upgrade-able RAM is such a non-issue that it erodes the validity of the entire movement by people claiming it to be important.