[nirui]

In this market, CXMT is more likely to also move to HBM production rather than consumer grade RAMs. After all China is also doing an AI push in a competition with the US, and the domestic Chinese companies are "recommended/guided" by the government to help, while consumers are pushed to lower priorities.

The situation I'm worrying about is that these PC manufacturers could use this opportunity to push for a more locked-down design, such as soldered RAM or even SSD. My current ThinkPad already got soldered LPDDR5 RAM chips on it with no user-end RAM upgrade possible, so there's a reason to suspect they'll take more pagers from Apple's book if they can get away doing it, just like what they did when they pushed out those internally mounted unswappable batteries.

My personal guess is that the RAM price will fall down after this period of AI expansion is over and major players starts to consolidate. But it will not fall as much as we're hopping for, because the manufacturers could just reduce production to control the price.

[15155]

Soldered RAM has objectively lower latency and better signal integrity. Connectors aren't free, in terms of link/SI budget.

This isn't some conspiracy, it's electrical reality.

[nirui]

Problem is, the gain in performance to an user maybe negligible compare to the pain that the device purchased might never be able to be fitted to run some application.

[hinkley]

Does that mean we should be designing HBM into consumer devices?

[nirui]

I wouldn't say "should be", but HBM could indeed benefit the end-user somewhat, like @15155 already pointed out. And that benefit could be used as justification for soldered HBMs on future computers.

BUT... a smart consumer would also recognize the other side of the story: do we really need HBM on consumer devices? We don't serve 1000 users at the same time, a slower, cheaper device is good enough for most use cases (including the professional ones), better if it's also somewhat future-proof. After all, smart people usually have better foresight.