Are PCs without external RAM coming?

Question

What would the performance be like of a PC that only had on chip RAM and GPU?Are such machines likely coming?

al2o3cr · Accepted Answer

Depends on what you mean by "PC" and "on-chip"; the M1 & M2 from Apple both have CPU / GPU / memory in a single package, though the memory chips are separate dies connected via an interposer.
The downside is obvious: there's no "upgrading" such a thing without replacing the entire CPU.
There are a lot of upsides, though:
* the memory interface can be wiiiiide like on a GPU; anywhere from 128-bits to 512-bits so far
* the memory interface needs less power, because it's only driving signals a couple millimeters instead of across a PCB to DIMMs.

theandrewbailey · Answer

Depends on the specifics. If it's something like HBM, workloads sensitive to memory bandwidth and latency could be massively improved. If it's normal DDR5, there might not be much improvement. The limiting factor would be capacity: this hypothetical CPU will have a hard limit on the number of Electron apps and/or Chrome tabs it can simultaneously run.Are they coming? They're already here. Have you taken a look at Apple's M1 and M2?

smoldesu · Answer

What do you mean? Many SOCs have integrated memory and GPU components nowadays.