The socket has big reductions in ram and pcie signal integrity. If you don’t plan to change the CPU and motherboard separately soldering it would save money and the store could do it for you when you order both together.

This is about RAM on the package not RAM on the die. It honestly makes no sense why we don’t have CPUs and RAM soldered to the motherboard right next to the CPU package. I love being able to change the stuff myself, but any reasonable repair shop could be doing that for you and we can have much higher performance than we currently have. It’s not like there’s really many viable options anyways. AMD has what four good CPUs intel has like two, and there’s two good ram ICS.

There never was really a 32-bit to 64-bit jump, there wasn’t really one from 16 to 32 either. When does adoption from both happened fairly far after the CPUs were common and backwards compatibility with x86 was why it never was an issue unless you tried to run beta software or had NVIDIA chipset drivers early on.