this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
490 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
76618 readers
2469 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If I'm following what you mean by packaged RAM, Apple does that. It's fast, but you can't upgrade it.
That's (as I understand it) a misconception.
Apple attaches their laptop RAM the same way all smartphones do. It's a wide bus with LPDDR, which makes it an unusual configuration amongst laptops, but it's technically conventional. And relatively cheap.
AMD's Strix Halo chips are the same. Apple could use LPCAMM to make the memory upgradable if they wanted, they just... don't.
When we talk 'packaging', we're talking putting chips on advanced substrates with denser wires than one could possibly get on a motherboard (or a 'mini' motherboard which is kinda what Apple/smartphone RAM is packaged on), stuff silicon fabs have to do:
https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/services/advanced-packaging
And HBM falls into this bucket. The way its hooked up to the processor is physically different than PC RAM sticks, or Apple's RAM. This is mostly not done on consumer stuff because its very expensive, and most of TSMC's advanced packaging production capacity is reserved for server stuff.