[Leo_Verto]

That's a bit disingenuous, isn't it? Of course at some point you'll need a newer processor and chipset to make use of the latest features and innovations.

But you can just move your unsoldered M.2 SSD to the new board. And when properly supported by OEMs, motherboards can last you for generations of CPUs.

There are B350 and X370 boards that were released with the Ryzen 7 1800X in 2017, that support the recently released 5800X3D, a processor two generations of microarchitecture newer on an entirely different node. And while that processor still has the same amount of L2, you get six times the L3 cache of it's predecessor.

[acuozzo]

> That's a bit disingenuous, isn't it?

No, it's not. Well, at least it wasn't intended to be.

The whole point of my post is: What were you supposed to do with all of the expensive cache chips you bought for your 486 when the Pentium came out?

--> They weren't soldered on, but you couldn't use them anymore if you wanted to upgrade your Pentium. <--

How is the situation with RAM today any different?

The only difference I see is that we now expect cache to be soldered on. I imagine in the future we'll expect the same of RAM too.

[webmobdev]

No. The reason the average consumer accepts limited cache memory in CPU / GPU / HDD / SSD etc, despite the high bandwidth they offer is simply because of the cost - they are very expensive. Thus, consumers accept the reasonable compromise to sacrifice some performance to match their budget. Otherwise, why wouldn't we all purchase server grade hardware? Or we could all be using high-speed SRAM for our RAM without even the need for cache memory in our CPUs. Hell, if SSDs get as fast as even dynamic RAM then we could even do away with the RAM completely - it would be a significant departure / upgrade from the Princeton and Harvard computer architecture that we currently use.

Yes, we expect cache to be built-in because the manufacturers of high-speed memory realistically don't expect the average consumers to be their target market, and thus chose the B2B model to sell their product. Nobody (that I know of) has also explored offering upgradeable cache memory as an option to consumers (hard to know if it even possible with current CPU / SoC hardware).

As for consumers changing their expectation to accepting soldered RAM and SSDs, that remains to be seen - anything is possible with powerful lobbying and PR. Personally, I think Intel and AMD would be fools to not treat any "integrated" RAM in their future CPUs as "L4 / L5 cache memory" while still fully supporting DIMM DDR RAM as that would make their CPUs more powerful and more desirable than Apple Silicon SoCs. Note that unlike Apple, they don't sell a closed-box solution and have to support multiple OS platform. Thus, it would be more difficult for them to offer a "one size fits all" built-in RAM with their CPUs.