> No Dell Latitude, Elitebook, Thinkpad X/T-series or even Fujitsu lifebook supported a CPU that was permitting greater than 16GiB of memory.
Here are the Lenovo PSRef specs for the Thinkpad T470, which clearly states 32GB as the officially-supported maximum, using a 6th or 7th gen CPU:
https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_T...
This is not a behemoth of a laptop; I'm writing this on a T480 right now, which supports 32GB officially and 64GB unofficially, and it weighs 4lbs with the high-capacity battery (the same as the T470).
I can't tell if you're trolling or what, but if you're serious, you clearly didn't look hard enough.
Edit: since you mentioned Latitudes, Elitebooks, and Fujitsu lifebooks:
- Dell Latitude 7480 (7th gen) officially supports 32GB: https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/latitude-14-7480-...
- HP Elitebook 840 G3 (6th gen) officially supports 32GB: https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c05259054
- For Lifebooks, I couldn't find an older one that supported 32GB, but this U937 has 4GB soldered and one DIMM slot which supports up to 16GB, for a total of 20GB, again, breaking the 16GB barrier: https://www.fujitsu.com/tw/Images/ds-LIFEBOOK%20U937.pdf
Any laptop which used LPDDR3 (soldered) typically maxed out at 16GB, but as far as I'm aware, this was due to capacity limitations of the RAM chips, not anything to do with the CPUs. For example, the Lenovo X1 Carbon had a 16GB upper limit for a while due to this. I believe the 15" MacBook Pro had the same limitation until moving to DDR4. But this is entirely the result of a design decision on the part of the laptop manufacturer, not the CPU, and as I've shown there were plenty of laptops out there in the ~2014-2016 timeframe which supported 32GB or more.
DDR4 support was introduced with the 6th gen Core (except Core m) in 2016, LPDDR4 support didn't show up until (half of) the 10th gen lineup in 2019. It's just another aspect of their post-Skylake disaster, wherein they kept shipping the same stuff under new names for years on end before finally getting 10nm usable enough for some laptop processors, then a few years later getting it working well enough for desktop processors. In the meantime, they spent years not even trying to design a new memory PHY for the 14nm process that actually worked.
No Dell Latitude, Elitebook, Thinkpad X/T-series or even Fujitsu lifebook supported a CPU that was permitting greater than 16GiB of memory.
I know this because it was something I was looking at intently at the time and was very happy when the restrictions were lifted for commercially viable laptop SKUs.
Citing that something exists predisposes the notion of availability and functionality. No sane person is going to be rocking into the room with a Precision 7520 and calling it portable. The thing could be used as a weapon and not much else if you had no power source for more than 2hrs.
Also, socketed anything definitely increases material reliability. I ship desktop PC's internationally pretty often and the movement of shipping unseats components quite easily even with good packing.
I'm talking as if I'm against socketed components, I'm not, but don't pretend there's no downsides and infinite upgrade as an upside, it's disingenuous, in my experience there are some minor reliability issues (XPS17 being an exceptional case and one I was using to illustrate that sometimes we cherry pick what one manufacturer is doing with the belief that there were no trade offs to get there) and some limitations on the hardware side that limit your upgrade potential outside of being soldered.