If you go with SO-DIMMs instead, iGPU performance will suffer from the lower bandwidth, perhaps not quite the Radeon 780m level of its predecessors, but closer.

Can’t really have it both ways, I guess and I doubt you can mix soldered LPDDR5 with a single channel DDR5 SO-DIMM, which would be rather better than having only 32GB in a µ-server setup.

I run an Alder-Lake laptop which uses 8GB of soldered DDR5 and came with another 8GB as a DIMM, where I replaced the latter with a 32GB variant. Has it perform with dual channel bandwidth for the iGPU and what left of the 1st 16GB beyond the frame buffer and drops to single channel beyond, where it’s the CPU juggling VMs.

But that’s still way better than paging or having to get a different machine and I rarely notice it.

But that’s DDR5 on both sides, something the memory controller was designed to handle.

*Mixing* LPDDR5 and DDR5 on a single system most likely isn’t supported, even if the memory controller can be switched between either type.

I got myself a Lenovo LOQ ARP9 sporting a Rembrandt-R 7435HS APU and an RTX4060 at a very low price, so I naturally tried swapping everything not soldered down, including the very mediocre MediaTek WIFI. At €22 the Killer variant of an Intel BX200 WIFI7 was only €3 premium over my usual AX100 WIFI6 card, so I went for that and was surprised it wouldn’t even boot: not a peep or BIOS, just plain dead!

The AX100 worked just fine, though, so I went with that and then investigated a bit later. Turns out I’m not the only one, plenty of people report that Intel WIFI adapters later than the AX100 simply won’t work on AMD, any AMD laptop or desktop!
And that both AMD and Intel do not comment on that issue at all…

I believe you are in a prime position to investigate that issue and if true, shine some public attention onto something that would then have to be some rather underhanded behavior by ….Intel, I’d have to presume, very similar to the USB4 story and many other past sins.

Ryan – Thanks.

Stefan – Good point. Updated with Beelink to make it clearer. I had a rough bout of food poisoning Sunday from hotel food and am still not 100%.

Robert – I totally agree.

If they made a “server” version of this, then yes, they could remove all the speakers and microphones and give us SODIMM slots instead. Or two USB4 ports. Or a 10G NIC. Or all three. That would be pretty amazing.