alt Hacker NewsYou could be charitable and say the bus is narrow because it has to travel a long distance and this makes it hard to have a lot of traces.
You could be charitable and say the bus is narrow because it has to travel a long distance and this makes it hard to have a lot of traces.
It's not. It's narrow even between the CPU and RAM. That's just the way x86 is designed. Nvidia and AMD by contrast have the luxury of being able to rearchitect their single-board computers each generation as long as they honor the PCIe interface.
It is also true that having a 384-bit memory bus shared with the video card would necessitate a redesigned PCIe slot as well as an outrageous number of traces on the motherboard, though.