Re:The Framework Laptop is now shipping
by emodendroket on Friday July 23, 2021 @06:20AM
(#27929085)
Yeah, I’m really curious where they go from here because it seems like the lesson is that modularity has a major performance penalty.
Once you get to a certain stage, yes, modularity becomes very expensive. I do believe that things like SSDs or WiFi cards should be modular, because there is no reason for them not to, but RAM? We are moving towards high-bandwidth on-package RAM, why would I want to sacrifice 100Gbps of performance and 5+ hours of battery life — not to mention also paying more — just to have an option of upgrading the RAM some time down the line?
Re:The Framework Laptop is now shipping
by emodendroket on Friday July 23, 2021 @08:48AM
(#27930068)
Right, and then even if you can upgrade the RAM, the machine may not even be compatible with the best RAM down the line anyway. It's hard to imagine another drop-in upgrade that will be as big as putting SSDs in old machines was.
What we can hope for is that SSD acts more like RAM. Maybe it could have a decent sized RAM chip that the OS can dedicate as cache for virtual memory. There’s a chance that at least some hardware manufacturers will continue to allow for replaceable SSDs.