Intel's lunar lake laptops won't let you upgrade your RAM. Here's why thats fine
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Re: Intel's lunar lake laptops won't let you upgrade your RAM. Here's why thats fine
#2Intel learned from Apple. Not many people want to upgrade RAM, but Soc RAM is cheaper and faster - part of the Mx performance over Intel/AMD is from a 3x faster memory access (70gb/sec DDR4/5, 200+gb/sec Mx).
"According to Intel, this move will make the RAM use up to 40 percent less power."
On top of the performance gains integrated RAM uses less power.
On top of these two things, Intel has better margins if they sell the RAM.
And while it's not as fast as GPU memory, you can easily have more memory for AI in an unified memory model (64gb e.g.) - or rumored 128gb for Strix Halo.
See how Mx is faster, uses less power, is better for AI, and Apple makes more money?
Re: Intel's lunar lake laptops won't let you upgrade your RAM. Here's why thats fine
#3I need 64GB, this Intel new generation will be useless to me. I think Dell XPS is the only laptop with Qualcomm Snapdragon X that offers 64GB currently.
I see upgradable RAM as on of the big advantages of x64 laptops over Apple and Qualcomm. Not sure Intel's current strategy to emulate their competitors, rather than play to it's own strong points is a good one.
Re: Intel's lunar lake laptops won't let you upgrade your RAM. Here's why thats fine
#4Intel learned from Apple. Not many people want to upgrade RAM, but Soc RAM is cheaper and faster - part of the Mx performance over Intel/AMD is from a 3x faster memory access (70gb/sec DDR4/5, 200+gb/sec Mx). "According to Intel, this move will make the RAM use up to 40 percent less power." On top of the performance gains integrated RAM uses less power. On top of these two things, Intel has better margins if they sel…
SoC RAM let's the vendor abuse the user. The 8GB needed to go from 8GB to 16GB on a MacBook Air cost Apple less than $10, but it charges the customer extra $200 for it.
Don't see how Apple makes more money is a good thing - it means millions of their clients have less money left.
Re: Intel's lunar lake laptops won't let you upgrade your RAM. Here's why thats fine
#5And still no ECC? And if a memory module has a bad bit somewhere, I have to replace the whole motherboard?
Re: Intel's lunar lake laptops won't let you upgrade your RAM. Here's why thats fine
#6And still no ECC? And if a memory module has a bad bit somewhere, I have to replace the whole motherboard?
DDR5 has a bit of ECC built in, but yeah - one of the major problems that Intel created is using ECC RAM support as a feature to sell their Xeon line of processors and so living 99% of the desktop users without ECC.
Re: Intel's lunar lake laptops won't let you upgrade your RAM. Here's why thats fine
#7And still no ECC? And if a memory module has a bad bit somewhere, I have to replace the whole motherboard?
DDR5 has a bit of ECC built in, but yeah - one of the major problems that Intel created is using ECC RAM support as a feature to sell their Xeon line of processors and so living 99% of the desktop users without ECC.
> DDR5 has a bit of ECC built in,
For me the most important aspect of ECC is not making the memory reliable. It's telling me the RAM is becoming unreliable, which you know because the number of errors detected and corrected is rising. DDR5 ECC does not provide that information.
Once you start seeing ECC RAM errors you know it might be the cause of system failures you see. Knowing a specific piece of hardware might be failing is far better than a random crash that might be caused by memory, or the CPU, or a software bug, or PCI bus failure and a zillion other things.
HDD SMART is the same thing. Once you see errors from a drive rising you know it won't be long before it fails. One of the negatives of SSD's is you don't get the information, so they fail without warning.
That aside, DDR5 ECC is not end to end. It might not be the RAM calls that are failing. It might be getting the bit to the pins on the chip, or the connector, or the memory bus, or the CPU RAM interface. CPU ECC covers all of that.
Re: Intel's lunar lake laptops won't let you upgrade your RAM. Here's why thats fine
#8Intel learned from Apple. Not many people want to upgrade RAM, but Soc RAM is cheaper and faster - part of the Mx performance over Intel/AMD is from a 3x faster memory access (70gb/sec DDR4/5, 200+gb/sec Mx). "According to Intel, this move will make the RAM use up to 40 percent less power." On top of the performance gains integrated RAM uses less power. On top of these two things, Intel has better margins if they sel…
SoC RAM let's the vendor abuse the user. The 8GB needed to go from 8GB to 16GB on a MacBook Air cost Apple less than $10, but it charges the customer extra $200 for it. Don't see how Apple makes more money is a good thing - it means millions of their clients have less money left.
"on a MacBook Air cost Apple less than $10"
I don't think $200 is justified nor do I want to defend Apple... but where do you get 8GB with 100 GB/s bandwidth for $10?
Re: Intel's lunar lake laptops won't let you upgrade your RAM. Here's why thats fine
#9I need 64GB, this Intel new generation will be useless to me. I think Dell XPS is the only laptop with Qualcomm Snapdragon X that offers 64GB currently. I see upgradable RAM as on of the big advantages of x64 laptops over Apple and Qualcomm. Not sure Intel's current strategy to emulate their competitors, rather than play to it's own strong points is a good one.
From the article:
"In fact, Intel’s future hardware will offer upgradeable RAM. Jim Johnson, Senior Vice President at Intel, explicitly said about user-upgradeable RAM: “We will offer those options in the future.” He also said that the “next turn of the roadmaps will offer more traditional options.”"
Re: Intel's lunar lake laptops won't let you upgrade your RAM. Here's why thats fine
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
DDR5 has a bit of ECC built in, but yeah - one of the major problems that Intel created is using ECC RAM support as a feature to sell their Xeon line of processors and so living 99% of the desktop users without ECC.
> DDR5 has a bit of ECC built in, For me the most important aspect of ECC is not making the memory reliable. It's telling me the RAM is becoming unreliable, which you know because the number of errors detected and corrected is rising. DDR5 ECC does not provide that information. Once you start seeing ECC RAM errors you know it might be the cause of system failures you see. Knowing a specific piece of hardware might be…
> One of the negatives of SSD's is you don't get the information, so they fail without warning
The ones I have here count how much data they have written. This is a reasonable baseline for telling me when to get a replacement.