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We upgrade RAM but not VRAM; why not?

On the reverse of this - why when a CPU from 5 years ago is still absolutely fine for gaming now - and you would need a new socket anyway - are we not seeing fully soldered motherboard solutions? A Skylake i5 with 16GB of fast DDR4 soldered on and a 500mb .m2 of storage could all fit on a pretty tiny board if you got rid of all the ram slots etc. Then one PCIE slot for discrete graphics and a couple of connectors for expanded storage and you would be done.
And in my dreams a Zen / Polaris PC with 16GB of Ram and 16GB of HBM 2...
 
Cost yes, distance to a chip yes, bandwidth maybe, complexity to cooling yes...
...BUT ABOVE ALL...
do you think it would be in NVidia / AMD interest if you keep your card for longer and upgrade just parts instead of buying a new GPU with their chips again??
 
Beren said:
On the reverse of this - why when a CPU from 5 years ago is still absolutely fine for gaming now - and you would need a new socket anyway - are we not seeing fully soldered motherboard solutions? A Skylake i5 with 16GB of fast DDR4 soldered on and a 500mb .m2 of storage could all fit on a pretty tiny board if you got rid of all the ram slots etc. Then one PCIE slot for discrete graphics and a couple of connectors for expanded storage and you would be done.
And in my dreams a Zen / Polaris PC with 16GB of Ram and 16GB of HBM 2...
Click to expand...

Because Intel does CPUs, 4 major companies manufacture motherboards and many completely different companies do RAMs. If all RAM modules were ASUS / MSI / Gigabyte the chances are they would try it to make us upgrade more often but marketplace with DDR 3 / DDR 4 is occupied by players like Corsair and Crucial so they wouldn't get away with it and have to go with the flow.
 
rene.agac said:
Because Intel does CPUs, 4 major companies manufacture motherboards and many completely different companies do RAMs. If all RAM modules were ASUS / MSI / Gigabyte the chances are they would try it to make us upgrade more often but marketplace with DDR 3 / DDR 4 is occupied by players like Corsair and Crucial so they wouldn't get away with it and have to go with the flow.
Click to expand...

I get that, but one of the motherboard companies could surely just source the chips from different people and solder them to a board...

Alternatively if Samsung teamed up with AMD they would have all the chips and tech to produce a PC of epic win proportions. Put the CPU, Northbridge and GPU all in a triangle next to each other and slap a water block over the top and you could have a beast of a machine.
 
Can't even really DIY it these days with the use of BGA over the older SO types. I guess theoretically you could have a socket like used for laptop RAM on the back of the PCB to stick VRAM packages into - nothing to prevent the development of an SODIMM style system.
 
Meaker said:
You can't socket an 8Ghz trace in an affordable manner with current technology, end of story really.
Click to expand...

Maybe I'm being a bit blase - I've had good results upto ~3GHz with prototypes using SSOP packages on a breakout board into a DIP socket where even a single pf of stray capacitance would destroy stability where many people struggle with parasitics and latency. Never done anything like GDDR5 with those kind of switching speeds though.
 
A socket would have to be deisgned, so more space and complexity of the PCB adding to cost and would be more prone to fail, validation would be a nightmare, they would probalay have to use something like LGA socket so there be increase risk of damage in the factory or by the user when installing the ram.

Back in the old day you did used to get some cards with so dim like slots but theses where custom designs where ram was more "simple" we are talking EDO days.

This is one of those things that sounds nice but in practice would be to costly to do on consumer boards. You find when they are developing chips there are testing cards where that can swap out GPU's and vRam for debugging
 
Beren said:
On the reverse of this - why when a CPU from 5 years ago is still absolutely fine for gaming now - and you would need a new socket anyway - are we not seeing fully soldered motherboard solutions? A Skylake i5 with 16GB of fast DDR4 soldered on and a 500mb .m2 of storage could all fit on a pretty tiny board if you got rid of all the ram slots etc. Then one PCIE slot for discrete graphics and a couple of connectors for expanded storage and you would be done.
And in my dreams a Zen / Polaris PC with 16GB of Ram and 16GB of HBM 2...
Click to expand...

Macbook pros say hi, they solder everything onto the MB now for better or worse
 
nkata said:
My S3 Virge had an empty memory chip socket which I did fill to double the ram but that was in the MB range not GB. (late 1990's)

64-bit DRAM or VRAM (VX) memory interface, 2, 4, and 8 (VX) MiB video memory, Single-cycle EDO operation
Click to expand...

I had a Nvidia one that allowed the same
 
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