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Beijing issues list of approved CPUs – with no Intel or AMD
(www.theregister.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Ampere CPUs use normal DIMMs, and don't have integrated storage, like any other CPU. So you can have the best of both worlds (although idk about power conservation, they are efficient though).
SoCs exist primarily for power efficiency. Long external bus lines and their respective controllers are very power hungry.
Also, tightly coupled RAM reduces latency and eases cache size requirements.
This isn’t the case for everybody, but I’d wager the vast majority of people never upgrade their RAM independently of their CPU these days. There was probably a spike once 8GB became generally insufficient a few years ago, but I have a hard time imagining the same thing will happen with 16GB configs until it’s time to hop on the DDR5 train.