I've long (very, very long) been a storage snob. Originally via the IBM UltraStar drives, and continued with the Intel SSDs. Even with good backups, a drive failure is often a pain in the ass. Slightly less so with RAID.

IBM really locked me in on the Ultrastar back in the mid '90s. Sure, it has proven itself to be a great product. But some of the first ones I bought, one of the drives arrived failed. I called the vendor I bought it from and they said they wouldn't replace it, I'd have to get a refurb from IBM. So I called IBM, when I told them I had just bought it they said I needed to call the place I bought it from because otherwise I'd get a refurb. I explained I had already called them. "Oh, who did you buy it from?" I told them. "Can you hold on a minute?" ... "Hi, I've got [NAME] on the line from [VENDOR] and they'll be happy to send you a replacement."

That's because the SSD business was little more than a carbon copy of most other consumer non Samsung or SK/Solidigm brands. They've been phison controller with some cheap NAND flash with a different coat of paint for generations now, or in the case of the portable/external ones, that plus a 3rd party enclosure and IO module that they'd contracted out. In terms of hardware, this sub-business-unit was no more "Micron" than Corsair is (Support may be a different story). Enterprise SSD's and Consumer ones diverged years ago, and today are about as different from one another as GPU's are from CPU's.

The only real difference between Crucial RAM and Micron's unbuffered RAM was which brand's sticker they put on it, with some binning and QA on the higher-end enthusiast SKU's and a heatsink. This sub-business-unit was almost entirely redundant to Micron.

> And the days of being able to easily swap memory modules seem numbered, anyway.

I keep seeing people say this in threads across platforms discussing this news, and it baffles me. Why?

All the higher margin non consumer markets are moving away from socketed ram for integrated ram for performance and manufacturing cost reasons. It’s hard to see what the motivation for spending some of their limited foundry time on products that are only of interest to lower margin direct consumers if this keeps up

> All the higher margin non consumer markets are moving away from socketed ram for integrated ram

Absolutely, positively, wildly untrue. Just because there is a boom in memory-on-package designs doesn't mean the market is moving away from expandable/socketable memory. The opposite is true. It's supplementing it because we're trying to cram as much ram as possible into things, not because we're trying to reduce it.

There has never been more demand for RAM. Many of the memory-on-compute/memory-on-package designs are going into systems with socketable ram. Those systems btw have never had more memory channels/slots available. Intel just cancelled their 8 Channel SKU's for their upcoming Xeon parts because their partners pretty much all universally told them they'd be buying the 16 channel variants instead, because demand is so high, and that's not unique to Intel. AMD and Ampere are seeing and responding to similar demands, by continuing to increase their supported memory channels/memory capacities.

> and manufacturing cost reasons.

This generally increases price, even when using things like LPDDR, especially as the capacity of the packaged RAM goes up (the fact that this can't be replaced makes yield issues a big concern whereas in socketable RAM it's effectively a non-issue). There are ways that it can be used for cost effectiveness, but those applications are generally not "high margin" nor are cost-sensitive applications of this deploying a lot of SKU's to cater the wide variety of demand in type/speed/capacity (eg (LP)DDR vs GDDR vs HBM and all the variations therein, not to mention buffered vs unbuffered, Load reduced, computational, storage class etc), because even with the chiplet/modular production of CPU's, that is not a linear scale up of cost-to-manufacture (or engineer) as complexity goes up. This isn't like Cores on a CPU where you can just disable some if there's a manufacturing defect, you need to swap memory controllers and scale qty of those controllers and use different kinds of DMA interlinks depending on the ram type (can't just swap HBM for DDR and expect everything to work)

For most performance oriented products, the memory-on-package thing is a new layer of RAM that sits between the cache of the compute unit (CPU/DPU/Whatever) and traditional socketable DRAM, not as a replacement for it. There are very real thermal and packaging limits though. For example, how are you going to install 2TB of DDR directly onto a CPU package? How are you going to cool it when teh available surface area is a fraction of what it is with socketable RAM and you're theoretically hitting it even harder by leveraging the lower latency while placing it so close to the compute that's using it, that even if the RAM is idle it's still subject to far more heatsoak than equivalent socketable RAM is?

This is further substantiated by the demand for things like CXL which allows you to further expand RAM by installing it to the PCIe bus (and thus, through things like RDMA/RoCE, through the network fabric) like you would any other PCIe add in card, which is leading to an explosion in something called Storage Class Memory (SCM), so that we can deploy more socketable/expandable/replacable RAM to systems/clusters/fabrics than ever before.

I could go on and on actually, but I'm not trying to attack you, and this post is long enough. If interested, I could continue to expand on this. But the point is, memory-on-package designs aren't replacing socketable memory in high margin markets they're supplementing it, as a direct result of demand for RAM being so astronomical and there being multiple hard limits on how much RAM you can cram into a single package effectively. The last thing people want is less RAM or less choice in RAM. The RAM itself may evolve (eg SOCAMM, Computational Memory, MCR, SCM etc), but socketable/replaceable/expandable memory is not going away.

EDIT:

> It’s hard to see what the motivation for spending some of their limited foundry time on products that are only of interest to lower margin direct consumers if this keeps up

This is a fair concern, but entirely independent of the first part of your comment. Worth noting that just because Samsung is the only game in town left selling consumer DIMMs (at least in the US), doesn't mean that the consumer market isn't getting supplied. Micron, Samsung and SK are all still selling DRAM components to consumer facing brands (like Corsair, Gskill, Geil). It's entirely possible they may reconsider that, but consumers aren't the only ones with volume demand for DDR4/DDR5 DRAM UDIMM's. OEM's like DEll, HP, etc and various SI's all have considerable volume demand for them as well, and combined with consumer demand, does place considerable pressure on those companies not to fully exit supplying the market - even if they chose to only do it indirectly going forward.

My most memorable RAM upgrade was adding 512KB to an Atari ST in 1988. Had to suck the solder out of 16x(16+2) factory flow-soldered through-holes, then solder in the 16 individual RAM chips and their decoupling capacitors. I was a teenager and hadn’t soldered before. I had no one to show me how, so I got a book from the library with pictures.

Was a huge relief that the machine come up successfully. But then it would lock up when it got warm, until I found the dodgy joint.

Was a very stressful afternoon, but a confidence builder!

I bet there are many people whose sole experience inside a computer is popping in some DIMMs. I’ll be kinda sad if those days are also gone. On the other hand, super integrated packages like Apple’s M-series make for really well-performing computers.

Huh... I did that, too :)

And before that I duct-taped the insanely large 16KB RAM extension (from 1KB), so it doesn't reset with the slightest movement, on my Sinclair ZX81, which I've also assembled and soldered from a kit :)

A fellow survivor of RAM-pack wobble!

There are dozens of us!

I also had a Crucial SSD fail. I believe it was either 256GB or 512GB SATA, around 2013-2014. Right around the same time OCZ released a batch of SSDs that were so bad they went out of business, despite being a leader in performance. It was a fairly large story about defective silicon. Good lesson in not being too loyal to brand names.