M1 upgradable!

[leadeater]

6 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

have you ever tried putting 32 gigs of ram in an i3 laptop? It can technically address 16 eb, but intel has limited it to 20 gigs. So, I  believe, that fruit company has done the same thing

For what purpose? Intel has an actual reason to do it, upsell you to more expensive CPU, Apple does not have this reason and as before would mean any SoC's produced and imprinted with microcode before being placed on a substraight along with memory chips would be limited to only that capacity, doesn't make any sense for Apple to do it to protect against what? 0.000000001% of the worlds population?

[LloydLynx]

People with BGA soldering stations could make some money with this.

[dalekphalm]

43 minutes ago, leadeater said:

For what purpose? Intel has an actual reason to do it, upsell you to more expensive CPU, Apple does not have this reason and as before would mean any SoC's produced and imprinted with microcode before being placed on a substraight along with memory chips would be limited to only that capacity, doesn't make any sense for Apple to do it to protect against what? 0.000000001% of the worlds population?

Indeed - how many different "M class" SoC's does Apple even make at this point? One? Two?

 

Intel has like 60 SKU's at any given moment. Among even a single segment (i3's), there were no less than eight different 11th Gen i3's.

 

Eventually Apple may have, say, 3-6 different SoC's based on the Mx design - and that's pretty far down the road even then.

[Bombastinator]

7 hours ago, James Evens said:

It is just sad that (often) repair equals throwing the old away and using a new part.

Stuff has gotten more and more like that over time as stuff has gotten harder and harder to make

[Guest willies leg]

I'd be willing to bet the next OS upgrade will disable this, and they'll force it on us. No comment, they'll just do it.

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, Sauron said:

That's not necessarily true, there are hardware limits on how much memory you can have (especially on an SoC) and I don't think it's a coincidence they top out at 16GB even on their "desktop" offering.

The actual limits, in a practical sense, is how much power the IMC requires to drive the attached memory to it. Where as the amount of addressable memory space it is capable of is far higher than anything we could make in like the next 20+ years as the actual limitations is current draw, voltage drop and signal integrity.

 

For LPDDR4X it seems that Apple has chosen to limit to 8GB module maximum size so 16GB total as it was quite likely during design the 10GB and 12GB modules either did not exist or were far too costly, and likely are to be honest. Aside from Intel CPU/SoC memory limits generally come from the actual maximum capacity we can produce (within allowed JEDEC/DRAM specifications), or for a low power design the maximum in a single chip as the power target the device is aiming for can only account for 1 etc.

 

It is far easier to drive a memory module the way Apple is doing it than it is to put it either on a DIMM or soldered on to the mainboard much further away (how it's typically done). So unless there is some critical design flaw or  a problem with TSMC 5nm there is no reason the M1 SoC couldn't drive either the 10GB chip or the 12GB chip.

 

The only thing I can see looking in to these modules is that they come in two different BGA sizes, and there is 4 in total I know of so maybe Apple's substraight is designed for one of those other 2 so the 10GB/12GB chips are not physically/electrically compatible with their design. If there is any limit this would be it.

[Video Beagle]

2 hours ago, Commodus said:

Ha — as much as Apple likes to govern how and when people upgrade, I think it rightly determined that the likelihood of someone soldering in new RAM and SSD chips was so low that it wasn't worth locking things down to that degree.

Apple has...or appears to anyway...a history of having stuff that top level hobbiest can mess with, though it's beyond the skills of most folks....I've often thought they leave those gaps to see what people do, what they like, and then develop that way if worthwhile.

[WolframaticAlpha]

4 hours ago, leadeater said:

For what purpose? Intel has an actual reason to do it, upsell you to more expensive CPU, Apple does not have this reason and as before would mean any SoC's produced and imprinted with microcode before being placed on a substraight along with memory chips would be limited to only that capacity, doesn't make any sense for Apple to do it to protect against what? 0.000000001% of the worlds population?

OK, I lose.

[HomeBoi]

Did they literally double the video memory? Since i read it as GDDR4X from 8 to 16?

 

Anyhow, its kinda cool. Really looking forward to the desktop chip from Apple, since we are seeing movement in the PC space towards ARM and Risk9 based things now it could be a fun 2-4 next years.

 

[Bombastinator]

4 hours ago, HomeBoi said:

Did they literally double the video memory? Since i read it as GDDR4X from 8 to 16?

 

Anyhow, its kinda cool. Really looking forward to the desktop chip from Apple, since we are seeing movement in the PC space towards ARM and Risk9 based things now it could be a fun 2-4 next years.

 

It’s used as regular ram. With an integrated video that also uses it

[HomeBoi]

21 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

It’s used as regular ram. With an integrated video that also uses it

Oooh thats cool, havent really read up properly on how the ARM layout works compared to x86. Thanks for the information my dude