Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
view the rest of the comments
It's probably the increased capacitance (think of of it as a puddle that needs filling before the water can move beyond it) of a mechanical connnection system vs direct soldering that makes most of the difference.
I was going to call you out on the distance thing but I made the maths and indeed at 100GHz light only travels about 3mm between waves and electric signal propagation on a line is roughly lightspeed (if you disregard capacitance) so even though this memory bus is likely not working at 100GHz to get 100GB/s (it's actually using paralellism for increase bits per cycle) it is none the less already within clock speed ranges were distances of centimeters do mater.
That said keep in mind that rountrip propagation only really maters at the very biginning of the download of a memory block as that when the address goes down and the data starts coming back and the roundtrip propagation affects the delay between them.
But yeah, I can see how you would start worrying with centimeter and even millimiter distances when trying to extract a bit more performance from data exchanges at these clock speeds.