> They have excellent engineering resources - why didn't they just take their ARC cards and add more RAM to them? People are dropping $2K+ on the 5090 with 32GB and would surely pay $1200+ for an ARC with 32GB or even much more for one with 64GB or higher. Absolute performance wouldn't be the benchmark; being able to load larger models would make for excellent price/performance, for many lower-end uses.
This one also drives me bonkers, but my guess is that it doesn't capture that margin they want.
Intel seems to be kinda bad at starting from an 'underdog' standpoint in a market.
> Intel did the same with their only offering dual-memory channel and thus much lower bandwidth of CPU RAM ; unless you are buying an expensive server, you only get 2 channels to RAM; Apple increased their RAM bandwidth significantly and as it turns out, customers liked that, and bought more Apple CPUs.
Apple has much tighter integration; i.e. they don't have sockets for the CPU or memory. What you buy is what you get unless you're brave enough to solder.
AMD provides a sort of in-between with Threadripper and it's pro variant, however it seems that they have a bit of a limitation on bandwidth based on CCDs for the low core count Pro models [0].
> Intel has to become "hungry" once more and stop their sedate, sclerotic ways. Maybe caring about their customers would help, too.
TBH I think whatever body (JEDEC I'd guess) needs to either make DDR6 128bit, or at the very least (and if even possible) work with memory controller folks to figure out a way to have a 'one stick, two channels' standard that simplifies board routing and keeps OEM usage simple.
It's really curious to me that over the last decade I've only dealt with one machine that only supported single channel, and the ones that 'were' single channel absolutely could have been dual channel but the OE could save a few bucks by going single channel due to the cost of two DIMMS vs one.
[0] - https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mcrx23/psa_the...