Why are laptop CPUs no longer socketed?

Some time ago, every laptop still had a socket such as the rPGA 988B socket (G3) or another mobile socket. However, no laptop has any sockets anymore, apart from the extremely expensive models. But that would be perfect for gamers and upgraders. Why is there no such thing anymore?

Because laptops are also built in such a way that nobody dares to touch them anymore.

Welcome to today's throwaway society.

Because the base is 3 to 5 mm thick. Space that is no longer in the ultra-thin notebooks. In addition, it costs significantly more to install an entire mechanism in which a CPU has to be inserted than to solder it directly. Since nowadays nobody repairs his laptop anyway (unfortunately) the customer doesn't pay for a feature that he doesn't use anyway.

It's more of a curd. It doesn't matter whether it's socketed or soldered. Because of the cooling concept nobody "dares" to do it.

Upgrading a laptop's CPU won't work. Or only in very few cases.

In consumer notebooks, the complete cooling is matched to the components actually installed.

Ohh yes.

Those who do that also solder out the CPU.

So when it comes to the cooling concept, I still get the cooler and the thermal paste is renewed. When the laptop is so wide open in front of me.

This is significantly less work than soldering the CPU out!

But I hate looking for the 10 billion hidden screws and so on. Some of them are so bad that you can't even replace the hard drive, BIOS battery or expand the ram without problems.

And then there's the fact that sometimes you have to take out the mainboard to get to the bottom.

Um… Did you take a closer look at cooling a laptop like this?

I even had my XMG laptop outside and replaced the thermal paste, yes!

In addition to the mechanical constraints such as limited height, there's another important factor that is often overlooked. At today's speeds, additional mechanical components have a negative effect, the contacts form unnecessary inductive and capacitive loads that can undesirably falsify the signals and that can hardly be conjured up.

In addition from: https://www.elektronik-kompendium.de/sites/com/0403301.htm

"But changing the socket is very important for the further development of the processors.

The number of pins increases whenever more functional units are planted in the processor or when external connections have to be accelerated. Since the base limits the transmission frequency, you simply increase the number of connections.

Another sticking point is the power consumption. A socket contact can only withstand a certain power. If this is exceeded, the maximum total performance of the processor must be distributed over several contacts. Since the power consumption generally increases with each new processor generation, a socket change is necessary for this reason alone.

The socket defines some properties of the processor:

Arrangement of the contacts (pins)
possible clock frequencies
operating voltage used "

Therefore, arguments such as "throw-away society" make little sense, because who wants to carry an old cell phone in briquette format with them? These are also purely technical constraints that make the base unnecessary and even counterproductive.

So no. You don't understand the cooling concept. All components are coordinated.

Let's leave that.

This is the general wrong, see https://www.elektronik-kompendium.de/sites/com/0403301.htm

With the mechanics of a socket, you can't achieve the high and required speeds of the modern CPU. The signal propagation times suffer from such mechanical components.

Or are you still on the phone with an old corded rotary phone? Hardly, is it?

Couldn't you design the CPU like an SD card?

For real? In a Lifebook T901 with an original i5-2520M, I can also use an i7-2960XM, which works without temperature problems.

Really.

Couldn't you design the CPU like an SD card?

So do you mean that?
You mean that the cooler is only as strong as the processor also generates waste heat. This is true! In the case of socketed notebooks, however, several variants were also sometimes offered with several processors of different strengths. You just took the cooler for the strongest processor, even the weakest! So you could swap it later.

Of course, this procedure is foolish if you solder the processor directly.

You won't find a CPU cooler in laptops anymore. A cooler is nothing. Neither strong nor weak. A cooler conducts heat away. Heatsink or heatspread. Depending on the concept.

Fun fact: there's only one CPU in a laptop.

But I'm out of there, talking about something completely different.

With 500 to 1000 connections? No, simply impossible. The speed of an SD card is also very limited and it also has mechanical contact surfaces.

You can't get out of the dilemma. Anyone dealing with high frequencies above a few gigahertz knows the problem. Every piece of unnecessary conductor track or even a connecting leg (ONE!) Of a component is an inductive load and may have a negative impact.

The layout of such a mainboard alone is a challenge, since even the speed of light (and the properties of the base material) have to be taken into account, for example, so that signal runtimes are not distorted by different conductor lengths.

Then signals whose state changes at the same time arrive at the receiver at different times.

We're talking about high-speed traces: https://www.elektronikpraxis.vogel.de/high-speed-regeln-beachten-a-37055/. Now there's the mechanics…

We're sitting on the edge of what is feasible.

You mean like an Intel processor? 😉