Sometimes we get lost in the criticism of every little thing that these companies do and forget that honestly, they're all cranking out great products.

Monopolies don't deserve credit.

The idea that ASML would somehow be more worthy of merit if Nikon/Canon also succeeded is weird.

Would the moon landing me more impressive if Russia and Japan also managed it?

At the height of the craze, I saw a five-year-old card, the GTX 1050 (not even Ti!), going for over 200.

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/video-card/

From February: https://www.techradar.com/deals/looking-for-a-gpu-dont-buy-y...

I know this has been said a million times, but it's worth repeating because somehow the idea is still floating around – the M series very much does not have the RAM on-die. It's not even in the same package – it's standard LPDDR4/5 sitting off to the side with a lot of channels.

[1]: https://www.bgr.in/top-products/best-phones-with-lpddr5-ram-...

[2]: See other thread. :)

Current rumours suggest that's where AMD is heading, Zen 5 having multiple accelerators integrated and Zen 6 having HBM part of the package (on the datacenter variants):

https://youtu.be/6yFn85I5PbY?t=1222

Consumer PCs don't match this bandwidth because DDR DIMMs generally aren't as fast as LPDDR. Plus AMD & Intel limit their mainstream consumer CPUs to two memory channels, both for cost savings and to segment the market.

What about LPDDR (low-power DDR) allows it to be faster? And, by faster, do you mean lower latency? higher clock rates -> higher throughput? This is unintuitive to me.

My impression is that lower power means that you can't sustain higher clocks as readily (in fact, when overclocking RAM, it's common to increase voltage in the interest of stability).

I can't find anything about CAS latencies for LPDDR DIMMs.

edit: to clarify: when overclocking RAM, your two options are either increase voltage or increase timings, as if you want to sustain higher speeds, you need to either charge your capacitors faster, or wait more cycles for them to be charged.

By faster I mean higher throughput at similar latency, achieved by higher clock rates. And it is indeed unintuitive as to how this can be done while using less power than standard DDR.

My understanding is that it's down to two major factors:

1. JEDEC has iterated on the LPDDR standards much more rapidly. DDR4 and LPDDR3 both hit the market in 2012. But then LPDDR3e, LPDDR4, LPDDR4x, and LPDDR5 were all introduced before DDR5 was.

2. LPDDR isn't available on DIMMs, it's soldered only.

So given that most laptops sold by companies like Dell and Lenovo use soldered ram anyway, and that Intel and AMD both support LPDDR, then why are PC laptops with faster RAM so rare? I have no idea, maybe it costs a bit more and the manufacturers don't think they can market it as a benefit?

For consumers, the primary application that benefits from higher RAM bandwidth is real-time graphics rendering, and non-Apple PCs optimize for this by using discrete GPUs with their own onboard high-bandwidth memory.

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/tiger...

I am not a fanboy, but a realistic dude.

AMD ruled the last years but Alder Lake overtook Vermeer on both performance and price/performance.

And that is with a process node difference, Intel using 10nm vs AMD using 7nm.

And the future looks like Intel will enhance the distance between its performance and AMD's.

Intel didn't use EUV, so no.

Alder Lake relies on brute force, inefficient power consumption to regain the performance crown. AMD's chips are much more efficient, and efficiency matters in datacenters. There is only so much power and cooling available to each rack unit.

I think Sapphire Rapids holds a lot of promise, but it remains to be seen.

And in desktops performance is what matters. And price/performance ratio, and both are in Intel's favor.

Both Intel and AMD have plans to integrate memory more tightly onto the package of their datacenter processors in the next couple of years, IIRC, and that seems to be what the OP of this comment thread was hoping they would learn from M1.

But, whatever.