Hector Martin

And by the way, for the repairability folks: replaceable RAM on mobile devices is going away for good reason. Two SODIMMs is 128 bits of multi-GHz bus across multiple cm of board and a connector. That *eats* power. This isn't manufacturers being out to screw us, it's physics.

Put them in a socket?

What *kind* of socket? Even if you do a CPU socket thing ($$$ and adds thickness) just making space for the thing plus the interconnect significantly increases total trace length. There's a reason why the M1 has ~0mm between the SoC die and the memory dies.

Makes sense, but how bad will 32GB RAM or more be? That must increase distance from the CPU, so how bad does performance per watt degrade?

We can stack lots of memory dies together these days. We'll see what Apple does there.