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Re:New MacBook Pro has first ‘DIY-friendly’ battery replacem... by rasz on Thursday October 28, 2021 @10:51PM (#29034656)
>I can understand the soldred RAM on M1 — yes, speed of light and other laws of physics get in the way

so you do know the speed of signal in copper? ~20cm per 1ns. 5-7cm of extra track length to a slot would not hurt anything.

Re:New MacBook Pro has first ‘DIY-friendly’ battery replacem... by marcan_42 on Friday October 29, 2021 @05:41AM (#29036830)
It absolutely does. It adds capacitance, which means you need stronger drivers and higher voltage levels, which means you end up with a quadratic power increase to maintain the same performance.

You cannot push a 512-bit wide memory bus like on the M1 Max through a connector and longer PCB traces without massively increasing the power consumption of the interface. Remember, those laptops have a memory bus equivalent to 8-channel traditional DDRx RAM. You'd need 8 SO-DIMM slots just to get the bandwidth, at a huge increase in power. LPDDR RAM isn't even available in modules for this reason; it's designed for low power, and using connectors goes against that design goal.