> This is still going to have higher parasitic resistance and capacitance than a soldered connection. That's why it's not just a drop-in replacement for soldered RAM. You'd either have to use more power or run the RAM slower.
This isn't accurate. A compression interface can have the same resistance as a soldered connection.
There is a small infelicity with DDR5 because the DDR5 spec was finalized before the CAMM2 spec and the routing on the chips isn't optimal for it, so for DDR5 CAMM2 requires slightly tighter tolerances to hit 9600 MT/s, which is presumably the trouble they ran into with Strix Halo, but even then it can do it if you design for it from the beginning, and they've fixed it for DDR6.
> It's fine if you've got space to spare. It's not very practical for a laptop form factor.
The modules take up approximately the same amount of space on the board as the chips themselves. It's just a different way of attaching them to it.
> Given how few desktops Apple sells compared to laptops, I seriously doubt that they'd want to use a completely different memory configuration just for their desktop systems.
DDR5 and LPDDR5 are nearly identical, the primary difference is that LPDDR5 has tighter tolerances to allow it to run at the same speeds at a lower voltage/power consumption. When you already have the design that meets the tighter tolerances, relaxing them in the system where you're not worried about 2 watts of battery consumption is making your life easier instead of harder.
