You're right about RAM, that's my mistake. I never implied that they also embedded SSD into the SoC. I just said that they may have tried to minimize path lengths.

As an old overclocker, I don't believe that this compact soldering is only due to motherboard footprint. It would allow them greatly push the RAM chips to their limits.

> While this makes for slightly shorter path lengths, the only real gain is motherboard footprint.

Well, that and the ability to use LPDDR5 in the first place. There’s no such thing as a pluggable LPDDR5 stick; the design decisions around low voltages & high signaling rates make it physically impractical to survive the longer traces and discontinuities involved in the signal traversing a connector.

> Well, that and the ability to use LPDDR5 in the first place.

You can solder it on the motherboard, you don't have to solder it on the package.

Ah yeah, I was speaking to the soldering part and missed the SOC part.

Abandoning the common slot/sodimm design also lets them play with the channel configuration, which they'd need to do to achieve the bandwidth they claim for the Pro and Max chips.

Has reading comprehension entirely abandoned this platform?