I somehow convinced my accountant to order a HiFive Unmatched so will be looking forward to helping him get it running.
However, I wondered how hard it would have been to add one or two SODIMM sockets to the board rather than all those DDR 4 chips soldered to the board?
That would make it much more usable.
@realrichardsharpe, that is something I’d like to see. Even if the SoC only had 1 external memory bus, if it could support 2 SO-DIMMs on the same bus, that would double the memory.
This is part of the reason why I could not justify $665 US for this board. Fixed memory.
Plus, if the SoC supports it, wire the sockets up to support DDR4 SO-DIMMs with ECC. The sockets will work perfectly fine with non-ECC memory, unlike DDR3 SO-DIMMs. Those had to be either non-ECC or ECC, but not both.
My HiFive Unmatched has already had its RAM increased from 8 GB to 16 GB and I don’t even have it yet!
DDR controller IP that can handle socketed RAM is much more expensive than IP for soldered on RAM. I believe socketed unknown/arbitrary RAM requires a parameter training process at boot that needs super secret code in a binary blob.
You probably would not like that.
That seems to have been covered here:
I had forgotten about that.
My Pinebook Pro ARM64 laptop uses a single chip 4GB memory module. Similar to what is used on smart phones. Which I am guessing is easier to setup that a DDR4 module that uses an I2C EEPROM for parameter & configuration storage. (Or however the parameters are stored.)